


Resurrection Man

by HeyYouWithTheFace



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Don Winslow-inspired, F/M, Feuding Fam'Lees, Fluff and Angst, Organized Crime, Prodigal son, Rickeen (duh), Slow Burn, additional tags as characters emerge to avoid spoilers, but not tooooooo slow, fun with violence!, so blame it on HIM when this goes blacker-than-black
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 07:23:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeyYouWithTheFace/pseuds/HeyYouWithTheFace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rickon has been pseudo-exiled in the mountains of Upstate New York for ten years, so long he barely remembers he's a Stark. Just him and his guardian, Osha, and the wolf he saved with his father. Then word from the City brings yet more bad news: his brother is dead, his family is shattered and he's needed back where he belongs. </p><p>But does he belong there anymore? He doesn't think so, but with his sisters trapped or in the wind and Brandon weak on the streets, he's what the Starks need. Rickon doesn't care about justice or the Families or taking up the crown. He wants his revenge, and his siblings safe. </p><p>One of his few allies is a mysterious girl with a half-burned face, another broken soul with her own reasons for waging a one-woman war against the powers of the City. Rickon's happy to use her to gain his vengeance, but as he sinks deeper into the City, in the mud and the blood he finds another reason to stay. One he was never expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. All Change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122523623098/resurrection-man-by-heyyouwiththeface)

"Bury all your secrets in my skin,  
Come away with innocence,  
And leave me with my sins."

 

The burn of sage is still clinging to her when she hears an engine winding up the driveway. Which is more of a _trail_ than a _driveway_ ; half a mile of winding dirt and fallen leaves through the tall pines and broad oaks. The woman who doesn’t smile much lets one corner of her broad mouth tug up as she listens to the engine roar then grumbles then rev and-

_Having trouble, there. Not a local. Not a pick up or a truck._

Which leaves two options, in her experience. Option 1 is the reason she has a loaded and racked Mossberg by the door. She glides over to it now, peering through the screen as she strokes the cold metal. Been years since it was Option 1. The kid was here for that. Sat on the porch shivering while she dragged them out of the porchlight and into the dark. Shovels and shallow graves.

Pulp shit. The whites loved it, or at least reading about it. To the Mohawk, it was a hassle.

Which isn’t to say she not ready to do it again, so she’s a straight and still girder of tense muscle as she watches, and waits, and hopes.

_And the lucky winner is…?_

A Mercedes doesn’t look good with country mud splattered all over them. Just doesn’t fit the image. Fine German machinery, sleek metal skin, marred and choked with dirt and grime. Osha would have risked a rare smirk at that image alone, like everyone else born and raised in the boonies. She does anyway, but for a different reason.

The two men get out and are like the Mercedes in the flesh. City shoes, City pants, City suits under thick coats against the morning chill. High altitudes. They didn’t adjust well to it. Or at least most of them didn’t. The Starks were almost as much transplants in the concrete and neon as she was, trekked down from the mountains and the forests before Osha’s father’s father was born. Their help was the same, especially the younger man, the driver, brown hair that hung limp around his face, pale features on the good side of gaunt, watchful eyes.

Bodyguard. Jory. Two words for the same thing.

“Osha,” the other man said as the door creaked and she was there on the porch. Young eyes in an old face flickered from her to the door and beyond it. The smile widened a touch; knowing, impressed, amused, twinkling down from eyes to thin lips. “Still on guard?”

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

“Among other reasons, my dear.”

 _My dear, my balls_ , she thinks, but there’s no heat to it. Luwin isn’t a Stark; he’s a lawyer. But if there’s such a paradox as a decent lawyer, then it would be this man with more hair on his cheeks than his hair, huffing into his gloves and casting his eyes over the valley.

“Coffee on the stove?”

“Yep.”

“Rickon inside?”

“Nope.”

The two men react just like she knows they will and yes, she’s something of a bitch for being evasive, but give a girl a break for needing some entertainment. If she was still some rez-dwelling ‘skin (which she was) she might have been fine spending years up in the mountains (which she kind of is), but the City left its mark on her. Magic touch or soul sickness, she still can’t decide, but once you see the bright, bright lights, they stay with you.

Osha hasn’t seen those lights since Rickon was barely bigger than the shaggy pup that came with him. Back when the house was a cabin, roomed by spiders and dust. But they had the stars, and that was something.

Now the smile vanishes. Luwin may look the kindly only man – he _is_ a kindly old man – but he’s a man with duties, and those make him hard. Relentless without being ruthless. His face goes from grandfatherly to lemony in the time it takes for his brow to knit.

“You recall _why_ you are here, I trust?”

“I do. But he’s a big boy now. He goes into town now and then. This is now. Or then.”

Leather loafers crunch the twigs and leaves as he approaches her. Hardly the gait of a predator or a fighter – not like Rickon, as she’s come to notice – but there’s heft there. The weight of years. Eyes that have stared down Lannisters and Boltons and Dothrakis and that’s just what she can guess to.

“He’s a Stark,” he says, like the word means everything, and it does, but Osha’s still about to fire back when, “And now he’s one of the last.”

Wind sprints from the valleys and runs up through her ears, scattering her hair as it goes. She hears it howl but the sound remains after it leaves. It’s blood. Pounding from her heart to her head and she swallows hard.

Not for the lost. She’s a loyal girl, is Osha, but it’s a matter of her word where the Starks are concerned. The debt she owes; will always owe. She won’t squirt tears for people she barely knew, though. That’s just not her.

She blinks, and for longer than she should. No… not the Starks. For Rickon. Been years since she saw that look on his face, too. That loss. That empty, formless thing that sloshed between grief and rage until it just left you-

Blank. Lost. Numb.

Osha swallows and looks to the dirt at her feet.

“Who?”

“Robb. The eldest.”

“Who?”

Same word, different question. Luwin’s an old enough hand to understand.

“Lannisters. Promised peace. Delivered something else.”

Osha snorts without humor. Almost without breath. _I don’t want to see that look on him again_ , she thinks, _but I want to. I want to see he still has something left in him. Something to grieve with, even if all he_ can _do is grieve._

“You could have called.”

“This is his _brother_. I wanted to be here.”

“Why? Will that make it better?”

“No.” Luwin shakes his head. A decent man. An honest one. Fuck he become a lawyer for? _Because that’s where he could do the most good_. “It’s just… how it has to be.”

Osha studies him and Jory stamps his feet and something caws from the trees and it’s enough for her to remember that, yes, they’re still outside. The City folk are starting to shudder a little and she does what she should do.

Or doesn’t, rather.

She sits on the stoop, knees up to her chin, arms folded over the top of them.

“Something else, isn’t there? His father. His mother. Now his brother.” He looks down at her and takes a steady breath. Observant. Patient. He was her teacher once, ten years and an eon ago, and she knew that look of old. Waiting for her to piece together the squiggles on the paper into the answer in her mind. “You want him to come back.”

“He has to. His brother is sharp, but he’s a cripple the other families won’t respect. Rickon is strength. The last son.”

“Daughters don’t count, then?”

“No.” _Ever fucking honest_. “Not in the City, mores the pity. Not that they can help much. The Lannisters have Sansa and Arya’s vanished. She was there when her brother was killed and the Twins Hotel turned into Fallujah. No-one’s seen her.”

Osha winces. Not like Luwin to use a metaphor so blunt, so bloody. It’s enough for flashes to form in the shred of dark behind every blink. Peace meeting. Good atmosphere. All friends again, glasses clinking, _smiling happy people holding hands_ -

Then knives. Or guns. Maybe both.

She shakes her head and her thatch of black straw rustles around her ears.

“You’re sending him into the meatgrinder. He doesn’t know the City. The politics. He needs time to learn and while he’s busy studying in the solar, some cunt will-“

“Osha, please-“

“Now _isn’t_ the time for _fucking etiquette!_ ”

She’s trembling and shouting and on her feet and her voice scares the birds for a mile around. The echo of it trembling through the forest, then nothing. Just noise. Just like her outburst. Jory’s hand is at his waist before her knees are even straight and she hears the creak of leather at Luwin’s side.

His glove. Halfway raised, palm open.

 _Don’t_. Jory would, too. He’s seen enough dead Starks, and those loyal to them.

“No. It’s the time for prudence. For the Stark you protected for years to come home and keep his family together.”

“’The Stark’”, she snaps back at him, spitting the word like she spits to her side. Oh, she’s had ten years to stew over this. Knowing it would come, one day, one death, one tragedy too far. “Like he’s _a fucking commodity_? Some chip you toss into the pot when you’re running low? His _name_ is Rickon, and he’s not _ready_ -”

“He’s not _safe_ , either.” Luwin’s tone doesn’t chance. Not his posture or his words or his eyes. He’s had _Pakhan_ Drogo over him before, and Roose’s giggling psychopath of a son. Osha isn’t even in the same league. “You think the Lannisters won’t tie up this loose end? They probably have men armed and moving as we speak. He _has_ to come back to Winterfell. We can _protect him_ there.”

Osha rolls her eyes and her head with them and follows them both until she’s turned away and stomping onto the porch. Hands pressed tight to her hips, staring down at the boards. Winterfell. Like moving him back to the old neighborhood will make him safe, when it’s an hour on the subway from Downtown and all those bastards who want him dead.

Dead. That word and Rickon together is enough to hollow out her stomach and halt her pacing. Turn her guts to water. Her breath comes out as a ragged wheeze and she damns all men for doing this to him. To her.

“You’re going to get him killed.”

Luwin sighs. He even makes it sound apologetic. Weary steps up to her and a tentative hand on her shoulder than becomes a firm grip. Until she looks into his eyes and remembers this man came from these mountains, too. Long, long ago.

“He wasn’t going to be here forever, Osha. I know it seemed like that, but he was in hiding, not in exile.”

“Try telling him that.”

“I did, if you remember.”

“Didn’t go well, did it?”

“Where is he, Osha? Enough stalling.” She shoots him a look that could skewer a rabbit. Damn him, too. For being a good man doing a shitty thing to a messed-up kid. “We’ve come to take him home, and that’s what we’re doing.”

She lets out her breath and tries to keep her head high even as her shoulders slump. He’s Luwin, Stark counsel, man of respect of influence, and she’s… Osha. She sits back on the rough-carved bench that Rickon spent last Summer on, hands gliding idly over the oak.

She inhales and the sage is still smoldering inside. Smoke teasing from the open window, twisting and turning in grey threads to join the mist. Silly, really. Old ritual. Her mother’s. Fat stick of it like an oversized blunt, burning and belching smoke as she walked into every room, muttering in a tongue not heard in the City since before it _was_ the City.

_Chase out the evil. Cleanse the dwelling. Protect the good people inside._

She does it every time he comes home now. Shaggy at his heels, lips puffy, face swaddled in tape and gauze. Bruises shining blue and purple and angry red. No words for her on those mornings. Just a fistful of cash on the table and a day or two in a dark bed.

_Bad spirits. They always come back. The always find a way in._

“I’ll take you.”

 

\--------------------

 

He goes down again and gets a mouthful of dried horseshit for his mistake. Hammering in his ears that’s clawing into his brain, sizzling down his spine. Beer and ‘shine hurled from outside the ring (and _that_ description is being _very_ fucking generous).

He spits and it’s a mess of spittle and shit and blood and bile. Pounded kidneys. Daggers in his sides with every breath. Honduran kid worked them over pretty good.

He breathes it’s like swallowing cut glass. Peeling away the flesh in his throat.

Eyes blurry and faint. Hard edges all muffled and smudged like something threw paint over his eyes. Blotchy, blobby limbs and arms and hands and bottles and handfuls of money. Jeers and shouts all congealed together with mocking laughter and under it all, steady, panting breaths.

But not from him. From the other guy.

Rickon grins into the dirt and ignores the stink of horse and sweat. No-one can see it. No-one would understand it. He breathes deep and they’re bellows on the fire in his chest. Cold, blue flames that he can tame. Catch kindling on his muscles, thick across his shoulders and his back, tapering down his arms and under the ink Osha designed and Tormund scraped.

 _There’s nothing beyond the ring_ , a voice says in the cavernous ache of his skull. A voice not quite his own. A memory. _There’s you, and your opponent. That’s your whole world. Not the pain, or the exhaustion, or the fear. Just you, and what you need to do. That’s what’s real._

He pushes himself up on legs not even close to tired yet. Second mistake from the Honduran. Boy’s quick, like all the Latin fighters he’s met. Bare fists a blur when he works Rickon’s body, snapping punches to his head, locking up when he strikes back.

A born boxer. Speed, timing, footwork. But this isn’t Vegas, he ain’t Pacquiao, and this sure as _fuck_ isn’t a licensed bout.

_He’s looking for a knockout. Shot to the jaw, boom, light’s out. Body work’s just the preamble. Get me to lower my guard. Low enough for a solid cross. Second mistake. First mistake?_

The kid come in again, wide-eyed and cocky, grinning behind his guard. Probably thinks he’s another hick from the valleys. Big, slow, hardheaded _Yanqui_ that thinks he’s a boxer and needs to be educated otherwise. Which might be true, at least compared to him. But Rickon isn’t stupid, and he isn’t (technically) a boxer.

_Should have remembered what kinda fight this is, kid._

Pacq  launches a flurry at his head and Rickon covers up, forearms stinging and shaking from the impact. Wrapped knuckles on bare skin and he grits his teeth, soaks it up and waits until he hears the kid breathe-

-reload-

-that fatal pause in his assault-

_Too late._

-pulls back his left leg and launches a solid knee up into his side. Pulps a kidney and the kid yelps out his breath all over him. He staggers but not far, retaliating, punches not sloppy, no, he’s good, and he’s a tough. _Macho hombre_. Tats on him too, and the kind you get from sewing needles in communal cells. He’s not backing down from one-

-make that two-

-knees, but he’s on the defensive. Five minutes of using the _gringo_ as a punching bag and he should be tired, should be on the way out, not-

-smirking behind his guard, hands coming down.

Rolling his shoulders and Pacq aims a feint to his left, thuds like a love tap on his arm, steps into a right hook instead, still searching for his Knockout-

-Rickon sways to his right like his pelvis is one solid hinge, big torso sliding out the way without a squeak-

-another body shot to that bruised kidney, backs it up with a fist to the other side, and Pacq drops his guard as he steps back, eyes screwed shut-

Rickon’s low. Crouched like Shaggy on the hunt. Coiled and tight and here, right here, is the Hunter’s Moment. The killing time. The screams from the rednecks and inbreds and drunk Mohawks and the out-of-town traffic of ‘bangers and tweakers and trash go mute in his ears.

No arterial pounding now. Just drums. Slow. Calm. In control.

Where he lives. What his pain paid for.

Slows his eyes and the world to a molasses crawl. Pacq’s arms go a touch too wide, his guard open-

-Rickon’s knees snap up and straighten, his left fist rockets with him. Centrifugal force and momentum and velocity and shit, son, who ever thought he’d find a _practical_ application for physics?

Left uppercut to the jaw. Backed by a few hundred pounds-per-square inch.

_Isaac Newton would have been a fucking fiend in the ring._

Pacq’s head snaps back and the impact wracks Rickon’s arm like he just _took_ a punch instead of doled one _out_. He feels a knuckles crack but no way is that slowing him down. Now when he feels a lot more crack in Pacq’s head. And he’s going, going-

Not gone. Smacks back into the wall of the stable and won’t go down. Eyes red and raging now, even as he’s spitting teeth and thick blood is oozing from his lips. Killing rage. Fucking hillbilly put a dent in his pride, in front of his _cuates_.

Rickon snorts and he swears steam comes out. He knows he should be impressed, respectful of the kid’s strength and tenacity, but honestly, dude, fuck that shit. He bangs his hands together and juts his chin. A simple challenge, old as time.

_Want more? Fine._

The kid fucking screams and it _ain’t_ to just get more oxygen into his lungs. He’s swinging and lunging and, yep, now he’s remembering this is no-rules-except- _nothin’_ in Tormund’s place, swinging up his knees when he gets Rickon in a grapple. Trying to work those kidneys again and he’s, like, obsessed with the body, when his hands are gripping Rick’s head and their heads are squashed together and Rickon-

-gets his arms and elbows over Pacq’s head, cuts off the agony trembling up from his kidneys and lunges over the kid, pushes him down so he’s in a good place for a headlock-

That he doesn’t take. This isn’t a schoolyard.

_Well. Mostly._

He grips the back of the kid’s pants and it’s fucking _atomic wedgie time_ , lifting him up with his arms that pump two-forty and he bends his knees, falls back-

-Pacq going with him, flying ass over face-

- _touch_ down onto the ground, back first, every vertebrae chattering like teeth in Winter wind. All the breath knocked out of him and Rickon’s on him quick. You get a guy down, you keep him there. He flips over and his muscles are screaming at him now, cussing him out and a thousand promises of pain are being made.

_Shut it out. Climb it. Push it back. This is your world, and you gotta conquer it._

Swings himself around and lands across the kid’s stomach, straddling him just as Pacq remembered what planet he was on, how his lungs worked. Threw up his guard and Rickon’s dropping fucking bombs now, beefy arms coming up and down and up and down and smack and crack and crunch and he’s wearing it away and-

It’s not the kid. Not Pacq. Not Honduran or Latino-

Blonde hair he’s seen in papers. Smirks and sneers and blood on his hands.

Blood he can’t see now even as one brown arm falls away and he feels a cheekbone break but-

Faces with every punch now. A new one with every impact, delicious and quivering up his arm and here, _here_ he is in control. He’s not in hiding or exile or being babysat and forgotten. He’s Rickon and he’s _alive_ , god-fuck-it.

Strong arms grab him, more than a few, and it’s like someone attached a parachute to his back in a wind tunnel. He’s hauled off the kid and he’s still swinging, now he’s yelling and fuck them, _fuck them_ for taking this away from him!

Pacq’s breathing, but not much more than that. A mess of brown kids rush the ring and crouch by him, a few others jabbering curses, jabbing fingers at him, threats obvious but there’s a wall of leather jackets and beards and bone-deep baaaaaaad attitudes in the way.

Tor likes Rickon. That means his Giants do, and when that crew take a liking to you, well, it doesn’t bode well for those that don’t. Only thing they hate more than fuckers messing with their friends is fuckers messing with their bikes.

“Always the crazy man at the end, boy,” says the man himself, beard like a pillow, like a red carpet against Rickon’s back, accent mountain climbing over English like he’s still getting used to it. “Makes for a good show, I’ll grant you, but-“

“Lemme go, Tor!”

“Ah-ah-ah!” Someone kicks the back door open and sunlight hits him like God’s Own Taser. Filling his retinas and even blinded for a moment, he can tell there’s purpose to their grip now. Uniform holds at his shoulders, Tor grabbing a handful of hair. “Time to calm down, _kompis_.”

He opens his eyes just long enough for the trough to rush up to greet him, takes a breath-

The world goes wet and ringing, then very quiet. Head encased in ice and things are wriggling in there he doesn’t want to think about. He tries to hold his breath but he’s too jacked to both, spewing out bubbles and precious oxygen until his lungs are fit to explode and his arms are shaking and-

Tormund jerks him out and lets him collapse back onto the dirt. No horseshit this time.

Just Rickon looking up at the sun through the swaying trees, or the suggestion of it behind the clouds. Panting and his heart racing and fucking shit, did he nearly beat some kid to death in there?

Tormund’s grinning down like an angel ready to swan dive into hell. Waves a nice chunk of greenbacks at him.

“Good morning for you, I think. Me too, I _know_. But next time, Rick?” He’s still sputtering up horse water and filling his lungs, but he feels the wad smack onto his chest. In a minute or so, there’ll be a beer and an ice pack in his hands, too. “Don’t fuck the other guy that bad. Fucking ambulances cost money.”

“Fuck… Fuck him…” Out of breath, coughing up pond scum and with bruises already blossoming, Rickon still can’t help himself. “‘Fuck him _up’_ … Tor. C’mon… we’ve talked about… proper verbs before…”

There’s low, rumbling laughter and Rickon’s fit to join them but then there’s a howl that goes on and on and shuts them all up. Big, rough men, most of them ‘skins who ain’t scared of shit, and Rickon can see their limbs freeze likes someone dumped them in liq-nitro. Something feral, ancient, built into the deep fibers of the mind, and even down there and blattered, Rickon smiles when he sees it.

_You hear a wolf howl, you remember we used to run and hide from them. That bad as you think you are, they’re worse._

Tormund being Tormund, though, and almost as big as a wolf himself, just rolls his eyes and drawls a stream of hardly-pleasant Norwegian before dropping the keys to the shed down to him as well.

“And leave the fucking dog at your place!”


	2. Ain't No Fortunate One

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep."

 

He didn’t stay around for the pats on the back or the “nice job, kid” bullshit, because the hell did he care if a bunch of losers were cheering him on? Rick didn’t go into the stables for them. He stewed and paced and clawed at the walls and ran in the forest and when he couldn’t burn out there, he came to Tor instead.

Just him and the other guy.

Starting off, he was getting his ass kicked more than he was kicking, but it was a sharp learning curve. Osha went nuts, of course, but by then it was rainwater outside the window. Lot of noise, lot of mess, but it couldn’t touch him.

“Hey?” He peels off another twenty and slides it across the bar, carved and scarred by years of drunks and tough guys. Thenn looks over his shoulder, red-eyed and tired but his pupils tiny. Still amped on tweak-dust from the night before, jittering behind the bar with his teeth gnashing like a shark chewing down a seal. “’nother couplea’ bottles and a shot.”

“Big Man says you had enough.” Thenn says, sliding it back with fingers jerky from amphetamine cancan-ing through his system. Marks on his face framing his eyes, not quite tats, not quite scars. “Give you another ice pack, if you need it. But no more booze.”

Rick’s lip curls back and he feels the fire again, but it’s not cold or blue anymore. He raises up from his seat and rests his fists on the bar. Thenn tops him by a good five inches but he was there two hours ago. Saw what Rickon could do when he didn’t give a fuck about bruised knuckles. The older man crosses his arms and trusts to, well, the way things are.

“Gonna get hard with me? Don’t think so. Go hard with me, Tor stops liking you,” he smiles around his rock-breaking accent, almost like Tor’s. He and a bunch of others came over way before Rickon and Osha rolled into town. Running or just doing the whole immigrant-to-America thing, Rickon never bothered to ask. Not his business. “No more fights. No more booze for a kid without ID. No more nothing in this town.”

_I could make it from here. Reach up and grab the back of his head over his shoulder, smash his face into the bar, keep smashing until teeth are dancing on the bar like dominos. Take the fucking bottles, **and** the fucking shot and-_

He sighs. Defeated and hating it, because Thenn is right. That is how things are.

_-and then Tor would beat the shit out of you for touching his man, **then** beat you some more for disrespecting his bar, and **then** , maybe, if you’re lucky, break your legs for turning on him. All over a couple of Buds and a shot of Turkey. _

It’s not exactly a tough decision. Even after all that shit – which Rickon knows from experience Tor would have no problem doling out – he’d still be frozen out. They wouldn’t even let him fill up his truck at the gas station, let alone take home a couple of grand every few weeks from the stables. He runs a hand through his hair and even his fucking follicles ache. Shit. Shouldn’t even be trying to raise his arm that high, even with-

There’s a clink of a glass placed smartly on the bar. Splash and dribble of something being poured. He looks down and sees a shot of brown delight in front of him. Thenn corks the bottle back up and tosses a fresh ice pack in his lap.

“But you made me money this morning. So you have one on me. Then you take money and dog and go home.” He flicks a look up and down the kid who’s built like a man, then shakes his head. “I were you, not be back for a week or two.”

 _A week or two_ , Rickon thinks, and smiles as he raises the shot. First time he stepped into the “ring”, it took him a month of grunting in bed and cursing when he before he was fit to try again. So he toasts himself, because hell yes, now it only takes a couple of weeks and he’ll be ready to-

“Another fight, huh?”

Fuck, and doesn’t that voice just take the joy out of him knocking back the glass. Amber sunshine turns to a solid burn in his throat and he chokes as he turns and Osha’s a wry raised eyebrow, paternal and sisterly all at once, watching the walking bruise cough and splutter.

“Osh.”

“Thenn.”

Which is as far as pleasantries goes with those two. The biker goes back to his bar and the Mohawk slides onto the stool next to her-

What? Friend? Meal ticket? Ward? Client? Rickon had tried to wrap his head around that more than once as the months turned to years. His one constant aside from Shaggy was Osha. Always there, always watching, doing whatever she had to do to protect him.

Even when that involved washing hands grimy with dirt and slick with blood and telling a twelve-year-old boy the facts of life in her own imitable fashion.

_“Bastards like that come for you, I put them in the fucking ground.”_

“I guess you won?”

He hazarded a smile. His cheeks didn’t thank him for it. “Yep, good fight. Kid shoulda’ played a longer game, is all.”

“'Kid'? And you’re the voice of maturity, huh?”

The smile soured and Rickon looked past her. Over a row of empty stools and a wall of empty booths and the dead neon signs. A truck passed outside. It would be the last for a few hours. The radio droned on with a DJ way too amped for seven in the morning and some corner of Rickon desperately pleaded for him to sleep. But here he was. A nineteen-year-old barfly.

He’d cut out middle age and gone straight to being the guy that propped up the bar long before anyone else was even considering boozing.

“They say age is just a number.”

“For you, it’s a pretty low number.”

“Six thousand nine hundred and thirty-five days sounds pretty big to me.”

She’s mad at him. It’s prowling beneath her voice. But some rare ray of amusement escapes along with a chuckle and a shake of her head.

“Skull used like a drum and you’re _still_ quick with numbers.”

“Man of many talents.”

“Shame self-preservation isn’t one of them.”

“My self is pretty well-“

The thought and the quip is cut off just as quick as it takes for Osha to jerk out her arm and grab a handful of him, right under the ribs. Might as well have jabbed a poker through his guts. He jumps for a second but there’s nowhere to go but the bar so he just hangs on and grits his teeth, aching agony that should have ended in the stables coming back full-bore and with friends.

_Well, that’s one way to sober up._

“You were _saying?_ ”

Thunder rolls from the floor and a small mountain of black fur jerks up its snout. Osha flicks a glance at Shaggy, eyes narrow as a snake’s. The big wolf has that stillness to him of all animals about to leap; that tang to the air around them that reeks of warning and boundaries pushed too far.

But-

“ _Don’t_ push me today, Shag.”

-this is _Osha_ , after all. Ten years of accumulated memories all involving “The Tone” crash over Shaggy like ice water and he gives a warbling little whine of submission. Rests his snout on his forelegs and looks up with those big yellow eyes.

Rickon manages to smirk as nerve endings crackle up and down his side. _Big fucking help, there, bud._

He lets something between a laugh and a whimper rattle out from between his teeth. Turns on what he assumes is charm.

“Hey, b-beats shou-shouting at me, right? C’mon, take a-another dig.”

Osha doesn’t reply, but she does squeeze a little tighter and Rickon’s pretty sure there’ll be a little red in his yellow when he hits the head. Doesn’t last long, though. She lets go and settles back into her stool. He can feel his eyes on her, and he’d rather have her anger than turn from the empty glass and look at her face.

_Fucking guilt trip. Can’t believe she still pulls that shit._

_Can’t believe it still works._

There’s no words, but the wordless gulf is just the drop before you smack into the concrete. Rickon gets his breath back and stares into the empty glass, smeared with dregs. She used to yell and shout at him, face furious and twisted, eyes wet and so very, very worried. He promised he’d stop. Meant it, too. But he came back, and back, until she stopped yelling. Stopped trying to hide his keys or talk him out of it, because distance and words meant nothing to him.

They both knew it, and he hated what he had to do. But there was no other way.

So it goes, so it goes. Whatever bravado he put on leaks out of him and into the stool and the pine floor and there’s that guilt, hollow and trembling and turning his head. He’ll have to make this one good. He’d _goaded_ her, after all. Made a _joke_ of her hurting him, and-

Her fingers fumble in her jacket. He turns to hear the hiss-scrap of a Bic, tiny flame touched against the end of a Marlboro. Crackle and suck and glow and that first blessed mouthful that fills your lungs with relief and tar and she expels it between the hand covering her mouth.

_Not a good sign._

No tears in her eyes. Just a stare into nowhere and Rickon thinks this is too much, too far, even for him. Open his mouth and this better be one fucking good apology-

Black metal and tinted windows over her shoulder. The other thing about Mercedes: they only really fit in certain places. Downtown and the leafy burbs, chrome towers and brick mansions, yeah, sure. Not a mountain crossroads with old stores and bars and dusty tourist shacks clinging to the arteries. Not there, idling gently, blank glass so clearly watching them.

Rickon’s guilt is blown out like a candle; something not quite fear and closer to anger is there instead. Already his ass is halfway out the seat, remembering where Thenn keeps the sawed-off under the bar, the backdoor, his truck out back, his keys, Shaggy, how fast it would take to do something, _anything_ , get her out-

Until her arm reach out and just touches him. Doesn’t grab. Just rests. Pressure that’s confusing and through the miasma, the wordless interrogation of his eyes, he sees an old truth.

God. Why the fuck didn’t he see that before?

\----------

The old man watches through smoked glass and across cold, high air, through a window filthy and cracked, but he might as well be in the room. He told her not to tell him, of course. Knew that she’d disobey him, as she was wont to do, and so often.

_In the broad strokes, she never fails. But the details? She’s always been very open to interpretation._

_One day, that will get her killed._

Not that Luwin needs to be at the bar to see what will unfold. He could close his eyes and see every act of the tragedy about to unfold; an echo of the real event, longer and bloodier and still rippling across a city of millions. He’s seen it too often, and forces himself to bear witness one more time.

The way the boy’s face freezes, hardens, but cannot maintain the façade. His shoulders stoop, cave into his chest like his ribcage is filling the voice where his heart was. Shakes his head and denies, denies, furiously, loudly, until the muted roar can be felt if not heart from even in the car.

Throws off her arm and they’re on their feet now. He’s spitting, snarling, an heir to Winterfell dirty and bruised and god, Osha wasn’t joking about what he gets up to when he sneaks off to the stables. But Luwin can still see it.

His father and mothers and brothers and sisters. That same look, carved from stone and willing to weather just as much. Luwin sighs and thinks he’s seen too many Starks collapse into loss. Remembers Ned him, young bucks turned respectable very much against their wills, so close that the fact they weren’t brothers was almost irrelevant. Christmas dinners and fireworks in July, late night working that became later night drinking, Luwin watching those kids sprout up like the oaks they passed on the way up here, surrogate to all since he and Erin couldn’t have their own.

The sigh comes again and pulls his chin to his chest. Jory shuffles in the front seat and spares a glance at the principal he’s been carting around.

Luwin supposes he’s lucky, in some ways. He got the phonecalls, shocked and disbelieving, sometimes choked with tears. Jory? More than not, he was _there_. A bodyguard whose let too many bodies slip his guard and hadn’t followed them into the next world like a man.

 _You see an old man who’s lucky to be alive. He sees a young one that just wanted to die with his masters._ Luwin’s lips pursed and flex side to side for a moment. He lets some ember burn in him, bright in the darkness, though he’s so used to it being crushed. _Never again. I hope. But it all depends on-_

A beep from his pocket and he pulls his phone. New Message. Blocked Number.

**WATCH YOUR BACK**

Mourning is pushed aside by the lawyer he’s been for nearly forty years. He can’t tell the source, of course, but the short, terse tone? Not the first he’s gotten. No calls to meet or demands or anything even personal, just these cryptic messages, modulated calls with a sexless, ageless voice snapping off portents without proper subject nor definite date. An e-oracle. Digital Ides, warning him of… what?

_“Watch your back”. Stating the obvious? Or something more immediate? Your own words, remember? Could be on the way right now. Is this a warning? A threat?_

“Here we go…”

Woman and boy are halfway to the car when he pockets the phone, message tucked away in his coat and his mind, for now. Bigger things to worry about. Osha gets in the front and Rickon opens the back door, bends down with his arm across the roof and-

Red around his eyes. Face splotchy and not just with damage done.

_Not by fists, anyway. Worse. Lasting._

“Wow,” Rickon manages, voice a wet croak for that word only before a wry smile slides across his lips. “Still alive, huh?”

“For the moment.” He pulls his coat a little tighter and nods to the seat. “C’mon, sit down, boy. Freezing out there.”

“Haven’t been a _boy_ ,” Rickon mumbles, every inch the Angry Young Man as he slides into his seat and slams the door. Hard. “Since we last met, old man. Remember when that was?”

“Your sixteenth, if memory serves.”

“Yeah. I remember-“

He stops. Luwin knows why. It wasn’t just him and Jory. Another Stark made the journey, all white, broad smiles and a birthday present of a two-hundred-pound heavy bag bigger than Rickon. Told him to keep in shape, little brother, for when he came back, and together they could-

_No. Not “they”. Not after the Twins._

“How it has to be”. Those were his words, too. The protocol and the _manners_ of it. You didn’t text or throw your voice across a phone line. You showed yourself and offered your condolences face-to-face, like a man.

Only now is he seeing how stupid that is.

The kid glaring at the back of the passenger seat has heard it all before. Enough to hate the words that come after, trotted out like they could staunch blood from the soul and raise the dead.

_I’m sorry._

_For your loss._

_They’re in a better place._

_No_ , he thinks, and feels so much older than he is. _They’re just not in **this** place, and they never will be again._

“We’ve come to take you home,” he says, deciding that stating the obvious is better than pointless condolences. Think of the future and all that. “You’re not safe here anymore. Your parents, your brother, the void they left has made your family weak. It won’t be just the Lannisters that come after you, now. Brooklyn’s too big of a prize for them to let it lie.”

“Jesus, Luwin, give him some time.”

Luwin glances at Osha, glaring at him like a big sister pissed off that Uncle Luwin is giving her little brother a hard time. He lets it roll off his neutral expression. He negotiates. He’s the persuader, the cajoler, the diplomat. That applies to _this_ family as much as the others.

“The fuck should I care about Brooklyn for, Luwin?”

The old man has to blink and check himself before he realizes a _Stark_ just asked that question. But it is. Clad in muddy track-bottoms and a ratty black hoodie, eyes dark shadows under the cloth pulled up over his head. Sullen, yes, but not idle. Anger thick in his voice now, hands clenching and unclenching.

“Rickon, it’s… it’s your _home_. It’s been your _family’s_ for years-“

“ _This_ is my home, Luwin. I’ve been here ten years. Winterfell, the neighborhood, the family _business_ -“ God, he _spat_ the word like everything Ned and Cat built was no better than a petty racket “-I forgot most and don’t want to remember the rest.”

“You’ve forgotten your _other_ brother, too? Your _sisters_? Sansa is a prisoner. Arya has vanished. Bran can’t do this all by himself, he isn’t street-tough like you-”

“So I’m the _muscle_ , huh? I’m meant to ride back into town and set everything to rights?” There’s no bar nor dam to it now. Everything’s spilling out thick and hateful and before he knows it, all two-twenty of Rickon is an inch from his face and damn-near frothing. “Yeah. Because _that’s_ how it works, isn’t it? Take a kid from the sticks and put a gun in his hand and boom, he’s a hitter. He can run a crew and knows the streets. Just wave a magic wand and Make Your Own Badass.”

“We could have men teach you-”

“Oh, you mean like _this_ asshole?” No target is taboo, either. Jory clenches his jaw and stares at the wheel, anchors his eyes so _his_ hands don’t get twitchy. Maybe because he knows it’s all true; all of what’s to come. “Yeah, grand fuckin’ job he’s been doing so far. You’re three-and-oh, Jory. Nice fucking job. He’s the best you got?”

“Rickon, we have other friends in Brooklyn, the Boltons, the Umbers-”

“Then go to them! Why the fuck do I need to go back there?!”

“Don’t you want payback for what those _bastards **did**?!_ ”

Well. That was it. Last resort. Damn kid, living in the mountains, shredded his careful, lawyerly arguments within the first salvoes and Luwin was on the ropes faster than he imagined. But he had the classic fallback, primal and bloody and he never wanted to touch on it.

_You forgot how far he’s been, and for how long. He’s barely a Stark anymore. But if this is what it takes to bring him back…_

Rickon exhales slowly. Face red and trembling and his voice comes from somewhere he isn’t, far too calm and distant.

“Yeah, Luwin. I do. But you want me for more than that. You want me to be Dad, and Robb. And I’m not. I’m just me.”

They stare and Luwin’s speeding through his moves. Knows they’re both on a cliff here, and a nudge the wrong way, well, it’s a wasted journey. But Rickon isn’t stupid, and they both know it now. The old man showed his hand, the young one did the same, and the lawyer keeps his face hard and whatever grief he feels, whatever he has to make up to Ned, he’ll do it damn well later.

“That’s enough for now, Rick. Because if you _don’t_ come, Bran will die-”

“You fuckin’ _dare_ lay that on _me_ -”

“Sansa will end up married to that sick little _shit_ Joffrey-“

“Wait, back up, when the-“

“And Arya will be lost or dead and probably _both_ and you’ll never know which and then, _then_ my boy, they will come for you, _anyway_.”

Rickon’s been gone a long time. Since he was a child and didn’t understand fully why his brothers and sisters and parents had men with dark glasses always surrounding them, or why he couldn’t play at other kids’ houses or ever go anywhere without those same Dark Glasses. But kids sensed danger when they smelled it on the wind.

Understood what the rules were in their world. Fixed and brutal and inexorable and if you didn’t play by them, you got gutted by some bastard that did.

_It’s not just you. It’s your kids. Your line. They wipe that out, no more revenge ten, twenty years down the line, and the message gets sent._

“Come back to the house.” Rickon says, already opening the door and stepping out. Face taut as spun steel and anger simmering below it. Enough to give Luwin shameful hope. Peace doesn’t win wars; well-directed rage does. Peace comes after, and they’re a long way from that land. “Not doing all this in a fucking Merc.”

“Why can’t you just-“

“You got space for Shaggy in _this_ thing?”

Luwin has to frown and dredge his memory before he leans forward, addressing Rickon’s ass as it straightens up in the frigid air. “You still have that-“

The door slams in his face and Rickon doesn’t look back. Osha slides out after him without a word to either of them and Luwin rubs his face, feels every wrinkle and line. Jory doesn’t say a word, because he doesn’t need to.

_Gonna be a hard night ahead._

\----------

“Fuck is this kid, anyway?”

“Does it matter?”

There’s a pause from the front seat. Then a laugh that pulls the wings off flies and shoots stray dogs full of BBs. “Heh, s’pose not. Job’s a job, right?”

That would be the end of it, if it was his conversation, but he knows the two up front like to talk.

_And talk, and talk, and talk…_

“I mean, way it was told to us, like, you’d think the kid was the center of it.”

“Not the gash and the old man, y’mean?”

“Forgot the shooter.”

“Nah.” There’s the sloshing of a can and the man with dark eyes clenches his jaw a little. Fucking amateurs. Boozing since Albany, even as streetlights become scarce and it’s only Moon and headlights marking their path. Black wraiths lining the roads, armies of trees and black slopes like sleeping giants. “There’s always a shooter. Protection, y’know?”

“Means he’s a somebody.”

“Who? Old man or the kid?”

“Both, maybe?”

“Good. Y’get more fer somebodies.”

A burp that reeks as much of halitosis as it does Coors. Thank Christ the window’s open.

“See previous answer. What does it matter? Just add ‘im t’the count.”

Chig doesn’t contribute, which the dark-eyed man expects, and is grateful for. Chig’s a solid guy. Does his job, keeps his trap shut. Doesn’t pound brews on the clock. But a glance to his side and a prick of his ears tells him the man next to him is in his own little zone.

_Click, click… click, click… click, click…_

Safety on his piece flicked off and on, off and on, red and green, stop and go.

“Seems to me.” Dag starts up again, like the dark road is just secondary and his own sodding voice is the bigger concern. The quiet man rubs his eyes and brushes the pistol at his hip as his hand lowers. Still there. Still tempting, too, with Dag right in front of him. “He’s the kid of someone important. ‘member what she told us? ‘Make sure he’s gone.’ Not the old man, or the shooter, or the gash. Special attention to the kid.”

Lorren crushes his can and tosses it. His third. Once again: amateurs. “Yeah, but _whose_ kid?”

“Ah-ha,” a wagging finger in the windscreen, getting the quiet man’s attention for a second. A brief tone of contemplation from a voice that barely had three working brain cells to rub together. “Isn’t _that_ the question…?”

The man’s glad it’s dark in the backseat; they can’t see him roll his obsidian eyes and look out the window, like he’s halfway-decided to open the door and trust his luck to gravity and the night air. Better company than these half-assed ‘bags, trying to fish details out of him.

_Yeah. With dynamite. Won’t be long now._

He stares into the half-shadows and growing night. Tries to transport some part of himself out beyond the glass and leave Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Cockend to the bullshit. The hum and rumble of the tarmac under him helps, gently shaking away his mood.

He lights a smoke and his hands don’t shake. He can’t remember the last time they did. Knows some would find that monstrous. Would shake their heads and recoil in disgust (but also, if they’re honest, fascination) that he could Point-Pull-Gone time and time again.

The man exhales and the smoke flees from him, sucked out into the night in a white rush, not a slow trail.

He blinks and takes another drag. Best not to brood, considering what’s coming. He focuses on the jabbering fuckwits instead, dragging his mind back to the task at hand and the tools they saddled him with. Cannon fodder wannabes, but he could guess why that was, too.

Or, more accurately, why it _has_ to be _them_.

_Couldn’t give us Lions for this job. Daddy didn’t approve it. Little brother and **littler** brother, neither. This was all you, yer lady fucking majesty, so you had to go with bottom dol-_

“Oi, you awake back there?”

_Oh, for fuck’s sake._

Lorren shuffles in his seat and turns to face him. Passing shadows flitting over a face that looks like something a butcher spent an hour tenderizing. Rough stubble and piggy eyes sunk in folds of flesh. Chrome shotgun in his lap, worth everything he’s wearing five times over.

_No ambition. No clue what to spend his money on. Pissed away on coke and booze and whores and shit he’ll end up pawning in six months._

“Wada’ _youse_ think, Bronn?”

Because they know Bronn’s in tight with the Lions. Carries himself smooth and cool like the movie tough guys they want to be, like they got into the game to _become_. And they got _picked_ for this job, right? So that has to mean the Lions are dragging them up from the docks at Pyke, giving them a real shot. Real respect. Real money.

His lips twitch under the smattering of stubble and steel-wool beard. It’s not a smile, and if it was, it wouldn’t be a pleasant one.

_No fucking clue._

Suddenly the car goes quiet. Dag’s eyes are on him in the rearview, still-livid scar from brow to lip a red and jagged line in the sparse light.

_Click, click… click, click… beep._

Bronn looks down at the phone that used to be. Now it’s got some tech-head’s contraption taped to it from the back, satellite phone antennae jacked onto it, piercing the electronic fog of the valleys and mountains. Google Map with a gangster lean, red dot pulsing in one corner. Not moving, not changing, and obliviously waiting for them. Blue and steady, in another corner, winding down the black lines with black intent. Guiding them to four fat envelopes.

“I think,” he says, voice as cold and measured as the way he plies his trade. “We’re about thirty minutes out.” He tilts his head just a little and Chig’s Colt metronome stops. Good man, Chig. Knows how to pay attention. “Call it in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks be to Jillypups for proofreading and miscellaneous epicness, including the pretty piccy-set for Chapter One. For those of you who don't know, [this](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fb/ac/fd/fbacfd227d42d11b00399ee48156280f.jpg) is an early picture of Da Pups when she started her tumblr account.


	3. Cats and Cages

"The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself."

 

_Fine and clean, broad and tall, a gilded cage ‘ere stands a prison still._

There was a time he’d remember where he read that. Probably granddad’s books, back in a place with bread lines and endless snow and a vast shadow. Those memories don’t stir often in him anymore; so much else had replaced them, time has pushed them back.  Now when one was touched and rose, unexpected if familiar, Sandor didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“Is that dinner?”

He’s scowling, but after what Grigori did to him, he doesn’t really have any choice. Relaxing his facial muscles makes him itch like burning needles, muscle and nerves writhing under skin that’s either blackened or scarred or just plain _gone_. On one side, anyway. The pills help but he doesn’t want to get dependent. He’s already one bad night away from being a full-blown drunk, so no need to throw Valium and Oxy into the mix.

He answers her by way of his customary grunt. It’s almost language, but not quite.

Her. Yes. If anything could stoke those faded images of his grandfather’s tomes, it would be her. She hasn’t been under the Sun without walls or ledges surrounding her for days, but she still carries herself like she’s just stepped off those storied pages. Even folds her pale hands together when she comes out of the bathroom, back straight beneath her dressing gown.

“Not yet. I want to go for a swim first, please.”

 _Please_. Sandor almost winces at the sheer fucking naiveté. _Still minding her manners._

There’s the rustle of a paper and Trant’s bearded, puffy face is glaring around it. Forget _lust_ : Sandor knows _fucking_ when it’s in a man’s eyes, and he’s practically molesting her from twenty feet across the suite. His lips curl up without parting, twisting his expression like a wax sculpture held up to a torch.

“Later,” he says, and goes back to what Sandor assumes is the cartoons. “After you’ve eaten. And _after_ you’ve let it sit. Wouldn’t want Joff’s _betrothed_ cramping up, would we?”

It’s subtle, but it’s there. The way her lips purse and almost curl, on the verge of tears. Sandor’s good at what he does because he notices the little things. The charge in the air or the tiny shifts in people, hands, feet, poses, stances. Watch close enough, and experience enough, you can tell an awful lot without words.

The girl, is trying so hard, but so is Trant. Because he _likes_ to see people squirm and twitch. Sandor’s stood by like an obelisk before as Trant heaped his words on her like poison honey, sweet tones and vile gloating.

What could happen to her. What _will_ happen to her, not matter what, once the shit from the Twins blows over and Old Tywin makes his move on Brooklyn.

How her brother died. What they did to what was left of him.

She’s cried all she can and yet her face looks fit to crumble again. Her hands wring on themselves, strangling each other and Sandor swallows as her own throat pulses with sobs she’s choking down. She wants to hate but doesn’t know how. She’s soft hands and burnished hair like sunlight struck to the earth, and he knows plenty of whores and even hitters who look that good, maybe better. But they don’t have it shining through their skin like she does. Everything they’ve battered her with and there she stands, biting back her bile and her anger.

Sandor watches her with that stupid serving tray still on one palm and re-evaluates the woman he's been guarding for last week. For starters, yeah, that's how she'll refer to her from now on. Not a girl to be easily brought to tears or bullied, but a woman who's weathering a hurricane with one foot on the ground. Standing tall and not even letting her shoulders slump.

_For what? The sake of Trant? Fuck that._

“I can take you.” He sets down the grilled tilapia with steamed veggies (Christ’s Nails, he’d kill for a decent borscht) and puts the warmer back on top of it. “Get a towel and your suit.”

“What did I just-“

His voice doesn’t slide from gentle to harsh; there’s no gradient with him. Whether it be to power, to prisoners or to the hired help, Sandor speaks to all the same. He spits a stream of Russian that Trant won’t translate, but doesn’t need to. Fat fuck tosses his paper and gets up, squaring off to a man he knows could break him in two.

So he hides behind the money.

“Joff ain’t gonna like that.”

_Predictable cunt._

“What?” Sandor snorts, pissed off she still isn’t moving and more pissed with how she’s gawping at him. “That she eats dinner at nine and not eight? _Job tvojemadj, suka._ Get the fuck out of my way.”

That might have done it. But there’s a gasp like a startled bird and Trant’s eyes flash to her, big old green killers that probably got him laid a-plenty, years before he became soggy and slow. His smirk is back and he lets it peel the lips from his teeth, grinning up at Sandor and making a point to look him in the eye.

“Yeah? That your game, big man? Get her somewhere nice and quiet? See what Joff’s gonna be fuckin’ bloody soon?”

Another sound. Not a yelp or a gasp. Something wounded and guttural and Sandor feels other memories clawing out from the dirt in the back of his mind. It just _feeds_ Trant, making his eyes sparkle like any sadist’s. Any pain, any tears, he’d gorge himself on them. Licks his lips and Sandor’s hand clenches like a shrunken anvil at his side.

“Not a bad idea, big man. Tell you what, hold her down for me and I’ll do the same for you. I know she’s college cunt and probably stretched out but-“

Whatever filth he has left to vomit, he does so literally.

Sandor’s arm’s a meaty blur in an Armani jacket as he draws back and buries his fist into Trant’s stomach. Hard enough that his belly swallows the whole thing and he can feel the suggestion of vertebrae kissing his knuckles. Trant nearly swallows his tongue and his knees knock, collapse and take him with them. He’s got one hand out to stop his fall when he feels the bile bubble in his mouth and-

Sandor grabs a handful of his hair, jerks it up to be blinded by the crystal-coated lights and his own dark features-

Other hands clamped over his mouth. Glaring down with rabid eyes and scorched features as Trant’s eyes bug crazily, bile and effluence sloshing in his mouth, swallowed, vomited back up, nowhere to go, burning his throat with ever acid in his stomach.

“I’ve been Joff’s man since before he knew your _name_. Before his _grandfather_ knew your name. He trusts me. They trust me. With _anything_ , including the girl. You want to make threats?”

Whatever Trant tries to say in response, Sandor doesn’t get it. He’s losing air fast, drowning in trapped puke. All he can do is stare and fumble at his holster. Sandor lets him get his hand around the grip of his gun before-

_Break a man’s bones, you’ve beaten him that day. Break his hope, show him just how helpless he is, you’ve taken care of the issue for every day to come._

-Sandor lets go of his hair, draws the blade at the small of his back and holds it to his cheek in one smooth, practiced motion. Close enough for the blade to gleam silver from the blazing lights of the suite, blinding him as he freezes.

An ounce of pressure. Enough for a nick and a red dribble under his eye.

_Predictable. And slow._

“Don’t. Make. Threats. Not to _me_. Not to _her_. Or I take your eyes and-”

“W-Wait, enough.”

Sandor doesn’t turn, but he glances. Slides his gaze a few degrees over and sees the blue swimsuit clutched to her chest along with a towel, all of her curled in on herself, cringing for a man who’d rape her and kill her and go for a snack five seconds later. Righteous. He wanted to feel righteous, and he _does_ , and now she’s _ruining it_ because she’s still-

“Soft,” he mutters, shakes his head and pushes Trant onto his back. Fat man slaps down and his mouth becomes a puke fountain. “Too fucking soft.”

He turns his back and sheathes his blade after wiping it and his hand on his Trant’s pant leg. Just a dribble, true enough, but anything that stinks of _him_ , Sandor doesn’t want anywhere near him. Now he’s a Neanderthal in Times Square, stalking across the plush apartment, with goose-down pillows and velvet curtains, gold-rimmed plasma screen and a bath you could hold a trial in. Penthouse Suite of the Red Keep, no expenses spared, more luxury in the bathroom fittings than his whole town had back home.

Then there’s Sandor. Just shy of seven feet and _shy_ about _nothing_ else. Grey turtleneck under his black suit jacket, topped (bottomed?) by black combat boots he still shines every day, a soldier’s habit that’s as hard to break as any of them. The clank of metal under the smooth fabric and however much it cost, it’s still got his face crowning it. That sort of ruins the GQ look, he thinks.

Not that you’d know it, from the way she meets his gaze. Holds it when he opens the door and the two suits outside widen their eyes at sputtering, wheezing, fetal Trant with puke on his lips and blood dribbling down to join it. Sansa walks past them with her head down, holding tight to her swimming gear like a safety blanket, and Sandor barely spares them a glance.

“Taking the girl for a swim,” he says in tones that don’t require an answer, not slowing for a moment. “Call housekeeping for the mess. And from now on, _he_ isn’t alone with her.”

He leaves them behind, a scramble of whispered curses as the two of them march away and Sandor allows himself a smug little curl of his lips. Didn’t need to threaten, or accuse. The rumors will do that job for him, and hope against hope, maybe Tywin will decide to make a baccy pouch out of Trant’s balls anyway. Just to send a message.

Fine by Sandor. He’d be the one holding the shears.

“Thank you for-”

“You should have let me kill him.”

He would say that he didn’t mean to snap, but he fucking _did_. His hands are still twitchy and the flash in his pocket is nearly empty. Pain. That would have made it better. Easier to bear. But she robbed him of that and now his throat is tight and Sandor knows the right thing-

_Since when the fuck did that mean shit to you, vanya?_

“That-I didn’t want-“

“Blood on your hands? _There’s_ a fucking surprise.” He snorts and holds open the steam-frosted doors to the pool. They pass naught but a handful of crow-like maids and suited Lannister mooks on their way. Help or hitters, they all gave Sandor a wide berth. “That’s what men like me are _for_. Best you-“

“That’s _not_ what I was going to say!”

The door closes and he turns to a red whirl of her hair; starlight catching it in a thousand blinking strands and chasing his eyes to her face. Soft and without edges whenever she smiles, and yes, he’s seen her smile. Before all this. When it was shy and she was free and he wants to look away. His world is ugly and he helps make it so; beauty isn’t something he’s programmed to deal with.

_Yeah, and that’s the whole **reason**?”_

His jaw tightens, hard enough that his cheekbones jut out through the rough patch of black stubble. She’s in ass-kicking mod, all her softness sharpened down to her chin that juts out as she glares up at him, shaking her suit his way like a limp sword. Now it’s easier for him to remember that she’s not a little girl or a college kid anymore, despite her looks. She’s closing in on thirty and she’s seen horror enough to scab over her heart like concrete over fine china.

Enough that a man with a fucked-up face is apparently not sufficient to cow her anymore.

“I didn’t want _you_ to get into trouble!”

Sandor has to blink a few times before that one processes. Yep. He heard it right. “What? Why in the fuck-“

“Be _cause,_ you’re the only one that’s even halfway _nice_ to me in this-this _prison_ , of course!”

Ah, not quite he ingénue she seems. Sandor almost appreciates that, like anyone who takes bitter satisfaction in having his eminently shitty view of human beings proven right. But at least she isn’t trying to hide it, and when he twigs on that he’s frowning again and-

“Why are you telling me that? You think I’ll help you?” He looms. It comes naturally to him. She doesn’t back off. Stands stock straight in a gown and nothing else and doesn’t give him an inch. “Think the Lannister’s dog will bite their hand over _you_? I could get _ten of you_ with _pocket change_.”

Too much. Too far. He pressed and pushed and the little girl flinches as if struck, finally looking away from him. Gazes over the pool and Sandor keeps his own on her. Tries to see the machine whirring, the wheels turning, new plan or lie concocted to get on his good side. Another thing he’s always been good at noticing.

She speaks in a low voice, so low the lapping water almost smothers her. 

“You’re the only one here who doesn’t look at me like… like you want to fuck me, or kill me, or hurt me, or all three. You’re a Lannister. You’re a killer. I know that.”

She turns back to him with those blue eyes, and Sandor feels his collar shrink a little around his neck. People lie. Everyone lies. It’s the nature of his world. So when someone’s honest with you, even sad and exhausted and homesick, you still hear the lie. You long for it. Because then it would make sense.

He waits. He looks. He doesn’t see it. Just blue pools like the water she’s about to swim in, looking up at him with that sad smile of an older woman, seen too many funerals and not enough weddings.

“But otherwise I’d be alone.”

The water laps and the tiny echoes bounce off the marble dome above it. Sandor swallows and doesn’t quite get it down, whatever it is that’s caught in his throat. He flexes his hands and forces that stone mask to settle over his features.

_Remember what you promised: keep things simple. No connections. Nothing tying you down._

“Get changed, little bird. I said I’d have you back by nine. You’re wasting swimming time.”

It isn’t a curse. It isn’t his growling threat or his biting insults. That alone is enough to birth a hesitant smile on her face, surprised and almost breathless until he makes a little “tsst!” with his teeth and jerks his head towards the changing room. Watches her pad away with fresh bounce in her bare feet across the marble.

Sandor downs the rest of the flask and coughs like an old man as the rotgut plays Devil’s Night with his throat. Burns through his nerves and taste buds and overwhelms everything else in bubbling fire, if only for a moment.

Only a moment.

He sits on the marble bench laid into the wall, feeling the condensation dampen his ass and ignores it. He flexes his fingers and doesn’t feel any pain in those callused knobs of bone where his knuckles are. His long hair made wet and lank from the steam annoys him more, and he has to smooth or bat it out of his eyes. After a moment he concedes defeat and gathers it all up into a ponytail, exposing all of Grigori’s handiwork to the empty room for the sake of his comfort-

Just as she emerges. A one-piece, of course, classical and practical lady that he’s noted her to be, not that it does anything to truly hide her figure Towel over her shoulder and carefully folded back up to rest on the bench at the end of the Olympic. Sandor jabs needles under his eyes to stop them from wandering lower than, say, her neck. He’s many things, and happy to admit them all, but ogling a helpless girl is where he draws a distinct if somewhat hypocritical line.

_Killing women? Fine. Raping them? Oh, no, that’s too much._

_There’s a difference._

“Pardon me?”

Lark’s call in the marble cage and Sandor _can’t_ have been stupid enough to mutter that last bit out loud. Could he? She certainly heard something. Staring him down with her head cocked to one side, face looking more sculpted than usual with her red locks trapped under a bathing cap.

Sandor grouses inside and knows how stupid it is. It’s just _hair_ , after all.

“Nothing. Hurry and swim. Half an hour.”

She doesn’t press. Just smiles at him, a tight little gesture that’s still big enough to glow in the huge, cavernous room. Nods as if to reassure herself and Sandor can’t be sure, but she seems to take him in a little longer before she fixes and wiggles the goggles over her eyes. Checking _him_ out? Fucking insane.

But her eyes rove a second or two longer over his face, the scars his hair veiled most of the time, as much as he could without sacrificing his vision. Mayhap there was a glimmer of approval?

He sighs and the sound is crushed by his steep ‘caps thudding across the marble, taking up position on the wall between the changing rooms and the door. Gives him a field of fire that allows him to see the entrance, the fire exit and the whole pool with one half-turn of his head. He focuses on that, the myriad forms and protocols of his profession, choking off his useless thoughts. Folds his arms and his rising hands brush each of the tools on him, one by one.

Pistols and blades and the nasty metal surprise in his jacket pocket. Tries to settle his mind into that worn and pleasant groove of familiarity, watching, stern, intent and ready.

Shimmering pale arms and kicking legs under the water don’t give him much hope of that. He swallows and divides his gaze between her, and her safety. Soon his breathing slows and his eyes shutter, lids half-closed and keeping a steady tempo with his long fingers tapping against one beefy bicep. She has a good pace. Good form. Controls her breathing. Back and forth, back and forth, eating up distance and going nowhere all at once.

 _A cage is a cage_ , he thinks again, with more bitterness than he knows is safe.

\--------------------

She takes herself to the edge of drowning and pulls herself back, each time. At first it’s just exercise, her regimen, something she established and sunk into so well it became part of her routine. The first few weeks were a bitch, natch, but now Sansa feels odd, somehow diminished, if she can’t push her body to the brink at least once a day.

The pool is the best place for that. Full body work out, of course, like any good instructor will tell you. But it’s the wet roar and the blinding bubbles that she craves now, drowning out her senses and blocking out everything but the water, the routine, the challenge. Even if they don’t last.

Her arms slide through the water then up into the air, soaking resistance over her skin gone and replaced with the rush of air as her arm whirls-

Cocks her head. Breaths in with spray and foam, but enough for a solid lungful.

-plunges her face back down with her arm, heaving a handful of water behind her as her legs kick out at their own pace. No trundling dinner trays or growling bodyguards or the sounds of cars and trucks beyond bulletproof glass. No hint of her cage, wrought in spotless paint and scrubbed curtains. Just the blurry marble of the pool anywhere she cares to look.

Save for him. A black and hulking fuzz like a smear of paint against the white wall, distorted and twisted through her wet goggles and her speed, but still there. Solid and implacable. Probably watching her as much as the doors.

Sansa tells herself she hates him. He’s a Lannister. Maybe not in blood but by loyalty, and all the horrible things he’s done to prove it. Two years at NYU didn’t mean she was in a convent; she kept up with the news, the rumors. Her parents told her she had to be prepared, if she truly wanted to join the family business, protect it with the law just like Luwin does.

Sandor Clegane. Not his real name, of course. Ex-something hard and cold from Russia, currently harder and colder for the Lannister Family. They call him “The Hound”, and with good reason. They said once he had a name, a picture, the barest of details, well, that was it. Might as well jump into your own grave and save him the trouble. They said he was a drunk and rapist and a monster, not just by virtue his scars. Hulking and evil and cruel and they said only one was worse: his own brother.

 _They said a lot_ , she thinks as she rolls forward in the water, gravity her plaything under the surface, kicking off from one end of the pool and rocketing back the way she came. _They never said he was a man, too._

She’s black and white in constant motion, a ying-yang at war through the pool, but she can feel her thoughts straying from her exercise. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to think straight or without crying again after the night they killed Robb, but day by day, Sansa realized that humans adapt. Especially to horror. She was the Lannister’s guest, now she was their hostage. She thought her boyfriend was misunderstood but ultimately good. Now she knows he’s a beast, something from the Dark Ages given flesh and the keys to a kingdom.

Sansa’s cried her tears and soaked pillows with them. She didn’t want to get out of her bed but when she did, she looked in the mirror and it was still her. Still red curls down past her shoulders, that ugly green-and-gold pendant Joff bought her around her neck like a collar. Eye eyes rimmed red and blotchy and ugly and her nose was just one big sore from being rubbed and blown so often. But it was still Sansa Stark looking back at her, breath coming out in sobs but _breathing_ , still above ground and _that’s_ what mattered.

She was alive. She needed to stay that way. Sandor could aid in that.

Another lap. Another pound or so added to her arms, tiredness sticking to her skin like tar as she pushes herself right on through. Her lungs started to burn and she welcomes the pain, the exorcism of her weakness. Sandor Clegane, bringing her meals and watching her in the gym, the pool, the dining room whenever Joff fancied showing her off to his flunkies or his grandfather’s allies. She’s plastered smiles and empty talk to people offering her the same; every face screaming that they knew what she was and they either didn’t care, or couldn’t help.

Her eyes came back to Sandor plenty of times. His expression teetering between stoic and scowling, never more than ten feet away from her or the boy he’d been guarding for nearly ten years.

 _According to “they”,_ she told herself as she counted off another lap. Getting better. Not faster, maybe, but she’d prefer stamina over speed. _But “they” haven’t been **here**._ _They haven’t **seen**._

The way he pulls out her chair when she sits at a table. Brings her Cosmo and grumbled about it being a month old. She remembers he went an unexpected shade of red when she queried how _he_ knew that. Trant and his ilk leer over her and mercilessly violate her space if not her body. The gross man with frog lips has pushed her up into a corner once, fat, jaundiced tongue wetting his lips as he murmured his filth into her ear, never _quite_ touching her, but they didn’t need to.

She wanted to die, those few times. She scrubbed under a scalding shower until her brush was pitted with blood flesh flakes. And who was there with a towel held out and his eyes looking at the ceiling when she was done?

_Who else?_

She’s passing through exhaustion into pure pain, and she knows it, but her thoughts won’t let her be. Melvin Trant will be pissing blood for days now, because he disrespected her. Joff would have laughed. Cersei would have sneered like it was a good idea, hey, maybe we could sell tickets? Tywin would have given his grandson his patented Icy Stare and told him to _preserve your assets_ , like she’s prize pig to be kept fat and pristine for slaughter.

Sandor _acted_. Brutishly and viciously and as much for himself as for her, but he did. Why exactly, she isn’t sure, but if the Red Keep as an exit for Sansa Stark, it’s through the one they call “The Hound”.

_Use that. Don’t push him again. You told him enough, let him stew on it and-_

The blob is suddenly a vast shadow with black wings as she reaches the end and when she breaks the surface to gasp-

-his arm lashes out and grabs her wrist. She’s so busy spluttering and coughing up chlorine she barely hears his words, pattering into her ear around the water draining out of them.

“That’s enough. You’re getting tired, and I’m not ruining my tools jumping in to fish you out.”

“I don’t-don’t need you to tell me!”

“Well, I _am_.” His other arm reaches down and he hoists her up by her wrists, planting her ass on the edge of the pool like she’s a child. “And you’re out of time. Get changed. Your dinner will be getting cold.”

She’s a snort and a snatch of the proffered towel and everything a little underworld princess people thought she’d be. Spoiled and sulking as the water runs off her and back into the pool, staring at the waves still spreading from her reaching arms and hammering feet.

“Like the most I have to worry about is _cold fish_.”

“Some people aren’t so-”

He doesn’t finish and Sansa whirls on him. He’s caught on the back foot for a moment, mouth gaping and then snapping shut as she gets to her feet. Surely he can’t have been so bold, so blind, so pig- _sodding_ -ignorant that he was going to say-

“Lucky?! Was that it? Lucky that a _spoiled meal_ is my _worry_? Shall I list all the _others_ I have?”

She can see his face darken and his lips press together, ready to put her in her place but she doesn’t give him a chance. Rips off her bathing cap and frees the fire captive under it, a molten stream of auburn down her shoulders and yes, oh, yes, Sandor Clegane _is_ a man, also, because his eyes follow every trestle of it.

“I’m a prisoner of the man that arranged my brother’s murder, _engaged_ to his psycho grandson, I haven’t even heard from my family in days, and _you think_ -”

“That’s not what I-”

“Well what _was it_ then?!”

Her shrill shriek careens off the marble and it robs them both of their voices. So much anger boiling over into five words that even she’s left silent, save for her heaving chest under her swimsuit and his calm breathing.

“It could be worse.”

Again she scoffs and maybe she got him wrong. Gallant, maybe, in his own primitive way, but intelligent? No, she had him pegged wrong. So she smirks and shakes her head and she’s already toweling her hair and gliding past him when his arm snaps out and he holds her there without any apparent effort.

“Get your _fucking_ -”

“Language, little bird.”

It’s the tone of rumbling amusement that sets her off, flooding over the fear that he, of all of them, greatest and most dreaded, now has his hands on her. She tugs and pulls but it’s fruitless to the point of parody. An imp struggling against a mountain. “Don’t call me that, you bastard! Who the fuck do you think you are?!”

He leans close and fast and she can see the full scope of what “They Say” about him. In that the vast majority of it is coming from _that_ face.

The brutality he carries on his skin that flows to his hands and his feet and whatever else he uses to end lives. The grey eyes like gun metal, smooth and cold beneath black eyebrows. The stink of him, thick and earthy smells without any trace of civilization, and the whiff of gun oil and powder under it. Bad breath and whiskey on it, the kind that could be used to clean spoons.

The aged, smooth slices of muscle and tendon that suffice to half his features; working left eye almost absurdly alive in the midst of all that dead flesh and all the more piercing for it now.

“Take a good look, princess,” he grinds out, giving her a quick shake from the elbow like an unruly kitten. “Because _this_ bastard is the only one keeping you _safe_ in here.”

“There _is_ no _safe_ ,” she spits the words out before she can think, because it’s true and she won’t just stand there and gawp before him. “Just unspoiled. Until Joff does what he wants with me, and _you know it_.”

She feels the tremble grow in her. From the middle of her chest, shaking out through her ribs and her arms and she tries to batten it down like bile in her throat. But it comes up anyway, shock and trauma and all those black things that gnaw at her in the darkness setting her teeth to grinding and her tears falling through eyes that don’t blink.

Her father would be ashamed of her. Her mother, too. She would have gotten out of here by now, found some way. Not Sansa. Not silly Sansa who didn’t see the lions even when they showed their teeth to her.

“Help me.” She can feel the shame of the dead; their judgement and their disgust. She wants to care but she’s too far gone now. Grabs onto the hand grabbing _her_ and squeezes, desperate and uncaring even when Sandor’s face freezes, blocks of stone and iron clanging into place over his expression. “ _Please_ …”

They stand there, grasping each other in the marble room. No noise save for the lapping water and their own breathing, steady and ragged from man and girl. The world is the air between them now, and all that can unfold from what she’s put into motion. Words that aren’t subtle or clever or even _practiced_.

Sansa can feel time freeze, as if waiting for The Hound to decide which path it will take. She can feel his bicep under her fingers, so broad she can’t even get her hand around it, hard and warm even under his jacket. Like his-

_Face. Look at his face._

She does, and finds doubt flitting behind his granite expression. The way his eyes are alive and crackling above his stoicism, ruined flesh and bare muscle twitching like a living thing across one side of his face. It isn’t the countenance of the man she’d seen years before when Robert visited her father with his entourage in tow. Grim and hulking, a caricature in the flesh.

It’s a man at war with himself, with what he does and what he wants to do.

Bit by bit, his brows rise. Marshals his thoughts behind eyes gun-grey eyes and opens his mouth-

-looks over her shoulder and his words sputter and stall. She flicks a look over her shoulder and sees blobby figures approaching behind the steam-soaked door, both crowned with gold that shines even in the distance.

_No… No!_

“Away, girl-“

He pushes her back just as they opened and the lions stalk into the pool.

“Ah, _there_ you are, my girl! Joffrey and I were _most_ concerned for you.”

“Yes, you know how I _worry_ _so_ about you, my beloved.”

If Sansa has learned anything, it’s that Cersei and her son can make the sweetest words into something horrible. Their model looks and dazzling smiles just make them all the more hideous; walking proof that demons need only a body to become real. Joffrey, darling of the gossip mags, Senate material, the boy-king of New York, and God, how she’d swooned when he’d glided into her life and made her feel like royalty. Real royalty, in the castle spires of Manhattan. Cersei was much the same, not just preserved but positively gorgeous at forty-nine, putting to shame girls half her age, to the manor born and knowing it.

Both knowing it. Bred in it. Stewed and congealed in luxury and entitlement and now she’d seen what happened when people were born with God’s power at their fingertips.

 _No_ , she reminded herself, even as she threw her desperation away and felt the veil of meek, pliable submission fall across her face. _It’s not money, or upbringing, or class._

_It’s something older than that._

“Ah, sweet Sansa,” Joffrey saunters over to her a strokes a manicured hand down her face. She swears she feels the slime from his soul ooze out onto her skin. “Always flushed from her swim, hmm? It’s good that you maintain yourself so.”

His smile doesn’t waver. Mute the sound and he’s charm and concern, the perfect man. Then the sound comes up and-

“I want my sons to come into this world healthy. You can do that, can’t you? You’re good for _something_ , aren’t you?”

Sansa feels her head nod like a bobble doll and wants to find some twittering words to placate him. A “yes, Joffrey” or “I am, Joffrey”, but as her lips tremble and her tongue remembers how to work his hand drops down and she feels him _there_.

Pushing through her bathing suit. Daring her to flinch or move away. Anything to provoke the back of his hand or a punch somewhere that won’t show.

She still has the bruises. Sees them every morning when she gets dressed.

 _Don’t rise to it_ , a tiny voice screams at her, barely audible over the blood thudding through her mind, prey instincts screaming at her to run from the predator. She stands there like chattel and air shudders through her mouth into the steam as his finger knead and press.

“Yes,” he says, serpentine hiss behind his educated tone. “I think you are.” She closes her eyes and his voice is closer. Breath that’s caviar and champagne and rotted meat wafting over her face. “I’m looking forward to finding out…”

“Just taking her back now, sir.”

It’s a voice that promises death without even meaning to, and Sansa grasps onto it because it isn’t his. Has to curl her toes up tight so she doesn’t flinch to Sandor’s side, the man who would, could and _has_ murdered her father’s friends. It breaks the fog of disgust and fear and her eyes open.

Flat blue. Frozen lakes and azure marbles. Nothing more than a pretty mask and if that’s what she has to wear to survive Joffrey, so be it.

“Yes, Melvin did mention that.” Cersei’s voice is more amused than annoyed, a wagging finger gently chiding him. “Careful, next time, Sandor. The carpet was ruined.”

“I will be, ma’am.”

“‘I will be, ma’am’,” Joffrey giggles, high and childlike and latching onto any excuse to mock someone lower than him. Which, Sansa has discovered, is pretty much everyone. “I’ll never get tired of hearing you talk, dog. You always remind me of Drago, you know? From the Rocky movie?”

“Yes, sir.”

Flat tones. Flat eyes. Sansa hazards a sidelong glance and she knows that dead expression too well. How could she not? How often has she worn it?

“But mother is quite right. Melvin should have known better.” There’s a sigh of exasperation that’s a parody of regret; like Joffrey is even _capable_ of feeling it. He _tsk-tsks_ with a shake of his head and his eyes are writhing behind his faux-concern. “He’ll have to be taught a lesson in _boundaries_. Wouldn’t you like to see that, my honey?”

Sansa nods and finds her voice. One of many. The same dull, neutral voice of a soul beaten and broken.

_Let him think that’s all you have left. Just remember to prove him **wrong**. _

“Yes, Joffrey.”

“Oh? My, now _this_ is interesting. Little Sansa, really _wanting_ to see that fat oaf have some sense beaten into him? And here I was thinking you were above such things?”

He won’t shut up. He won’t let go. He’s pushing her with his words and the fresh memory of his claws between her legs and she knows he won’t stop until her pain no longer amuses him. She nods, eyes forced up to meet his dazzling eyes.

“Yes, Joffrey.”

“Is that all you can say? ‘Yes, Joffrey’? Like some trained fucking bird?”

“Y… I mean, if you would like it, then yes. Wh-Whatever you’d-“

His hand shoots to her chin and chokes the words from her mouth before she can utter them. In a breath the public persona is shattered, peeled away like skin from his skull and his lips are curled up past his gums in a rictus grin. Forces her to look at him, breath almost panting, aroused.

“Then say it. Tell me, my love. What would you like me to do to him? _In detail_.”

There’s a scrape from her side. Sandor’s boot. Changing position. She sees it move and follows her gaze up his leg and sees his hand-

Shaking in a fist. All the disgust she feels and can’t express tied up and trembling in a punch he wants so badly to throw and Sansa wants to scream at him, beg him because-

_“-we gon’ go all night, we gon’ light it up, like it’s dy-no-mite…!”_

The ringtone shatters the sodden air between them all and Cersei answers quickly. Joffrey’s attention breaks and goes to his mother. Her face set and eyes focused on the wall, nodding curtly and Sansa wonders if she understands _they can’t see you, you fucking idiot_.

“Good… yes, your orders haven’t changed… and I want _pictures_ , you understand? I want _proof_ , or you don’t get paid. Any of you.”

Her voice is iron but when she ends the call there’s that same wall of white teeth that have been as perfect as the rest of her for years. Sansa isn’t fooled anymore. Joffrey turns back to her and some fresh torment has birthed in his eyes, shared between mother and son.

Lions. They’re not lions. Sansa remembers her Aunt Lysa’s cat; the one that hissed and yowled at her like a ball of bristling hatred whenever they visited her. That one afternoon she saw it playing with a mouse in the yard. Letting it go a few feet then pouncing, batting it from hand to hand, and little Sansa covered her mouth in horror to hear it squeaking it terror, remembered the cat’s bright eyes alive with happiness.

And it was happy. As a child at play or a man in love. Content and satisfied with batting something weak and helpless around until it pressed too hard and she heard something _pop_ inside the little mousey.

It didn’t move. The cat prodded it, sniffed it, then sashayed away, suddenly bored.

_You don’t play with broken toys. You just find another one._

Sansa swallowed and blinked and she was back in the pool, two cats grinning Cheshire smiles at her and delighting in some secret torture like it was a present for her. Joffrey’s hand stroked her again, a mockery of a lover’s touch. His demand forgotten, something far more amusing taking its place.

“Get her fed and dressed, dog, and don’t let her go to bed quite yet. How long has it been since you’ve seen Rickon, Sansa?”

Her heart stops in her chest. Her lips part and her eyes film and the giggling little boy she played hopscotch with capers before them. She blinks and she sees him older, fifteen, sullen and carved into a stranger by his isolation, wandering out from the trees in camo with Shaggy, barely recognizing her when she’d come to visit.

“It… I haven’t-“

“Oh, don’t worry.” Joffrey’s grin widens and after a quick fumble, he shakes his phone in her face like it’s a Tiffany’s box. “Very soon, you’ll be seeing him again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Job tvojemadj, suka" : Phonetic spelling for "Go fuck your mother, bitch" in Russian. 
> 
> Enjoy saying it with a smile to your supervisor and telling him it means "A hundred blessings be upon thee".
> 
> My deepest, darkest thankies to the ever-ebullient Jillypups for being my beta on this. Holy Stranger, I'm using betas now?! :-p


	4. Feur Frei

“With our backs to the wall, the darkness will fall,

We never quite thought we could lose it all.”

 

There’s stillness out on the back porch, and after a day like today, that’s what Rickon needs. Nothing but the sanded wood under his hands and the night air cooling his cheeks. The sight of the silver dollar moon in mid-flip hung in the sky, so huge and clear he can make out craters unknowable and ancient. Ghost light touching the treetops as far as his eyes can make out, only stopping to shimmer on low fog and vanish behind the black hulk of a mountain.

            Yips and yowls of fox kits; the answering barks and whines of their sires, calling them to the hunt. An army of cicadas, dormant for decades in their trees, now come out for a night, maybe the next day, just to fill the air with their calls. Birds and roost and squirrels chattering in the high limbs. Nothing of man. Nothing save the muffled conversation behind the screen door like an ache in his ears.

_Why would I want to leave this? Why would I go back?_

            He takes another drag of the Camel, flicking the ash over the side, a tiny tumble of grey into the night. His ribs creak in protestation and he hisses with the exhale, jets of smoke shooting between his teeth. Oh, a fine homecoming it would be. Face like he’d been worked over by Tyson, hobbling thanks to pounded kidneys and, oh yeah, no fucking clue what to do once he got there.

            He wishes that was the only discomfort needling at his guts tonight. Say what you want about rage and bitterness, but they’re not difficult to slip into. Simple and pure and surging, like jet fuel at critical mass. It was easier to hold onto that a few hours ago, before the sun went to bed. But Luwin was insistent, practical, persuasive and, worst of all, informative.

            _The Lannisters have Sansa._

_They’re forcing her to get married._

_They’re out there, right now, this second, killing people your father knew, who loved him and served him. And once they’re finished with the soldiers and the servants, they’ll move into Winterfell proper, drag Brandon out of his wheelchair and put him down like a dog._

_Arya? She’s gone. We can’t find her. She was with your brother at the Twins. Saw what they did to him, still gasping out blood while they ripped him open._

_We can’t find her._

_They have her._

_Your sisters. Your brother._

_Your family. Soon they’ll be-_

            He brings his fist down hard on the wooden guardrail and crushes the cigarette into flaring debris with it. Doesn’t growl or cry out at the sting and bite of the embers. Welcomes them. Anything to drown the voice of that _fucking_ old man and the hard stares of _fucking_ Jory and all of the rest of them who didn’t _care_ about him until now.

            “They’re my family.”

            His words summon the black mass of fur and concern padding to his side. Wet nose prodding his hand until he relents and buries it in that thick mane. Looks down and sees bright, wet green eyes like leaves in straight sunlight. Always so worried about him. They always have been, since he grew from the injured, limping pup so small even little Rickon could carry him.

            _No. Not a monster_ , Rickon thinks as he crouches down to scratch behind his ears, smiling at Shaggy’s lolling tongue. His first true smile for hours. _A wolf. Nothing monstrous about that._

            The simple, soothing motion is enough to start sending him back. Walls of his mind and memory fraying, pulling him back so when he speaks again, it’s his father’s echo behind the words.

            “Take care of him, he’ll take care of you.” Rickon swallows harder than he wants to. He can feel the tremble on his hands, his voice, the center of his chest. The grief he’s buried coming back to choke him, resurrected like he never buried it. “That’s what the old… old man said, Shag. Could a’ left you on the side of the road like a possum. Would have if I hadn’t started pitching a bitch in the seat-“

            _“Daddy, he moved! I saw it!”_

_“Rickon, he’s an animal, we can’t just-”_

_“Daddy, he’ll die!”_

_His father was a giant in the driver’s seat, big and bearded and frowning at his pleas. He gripped the wheel tighter and flicked a glance into the rearview, watching the bundle of black get smaller, smaller-_

_“Daddy, **please**!”_

_Like all small children, Rickon was a lot smarter than he had any right to be. He knew how to press buttons, and he knew when Daddy was unsure and he had some wriggle room. He chewed on his lip and begged with his wide eyes and a feminine hand emerged from the backseat, resting on his father’s shoulder. Soft and smooth and undeniable, all at once._

_“Honey,” his mother said, in tones that were the same. “We can check, at least…”_

            Rickon blinks and the past vanishes, gone like morning mist but there’s still that fog in his eyes. Wet and stinging and mocking what he’d tried to forget. He bats it away, angry, turgid in his guts and it isn’t the fight or the smokes or the booze or anything living. Shaggy knows in a moment and without invite there’s a grown wolf nearly as big as him with his front legs on his crouching knees and Rickon hugs him. Sniffs into the fur coarse and smooth, not like the short, scraggy coat he bore when he first held him.

            _“He’s your brother now”, his father said, smile as warm and proud of his loving son as his mother’s was worried. A wolf is not just an animal to a mother; it’s teeth and chaos and danger that just gets bigger and bigger but with a word and a nod, his father made it so._

_“But he’s a dog.”_

_“He’s a wolf, boy, and he’s alive because of you. You saved him. That means you’re responsible for him.”_

_“Ned, he’s just a child-“_

_“And he’ll have Osha here to help, isn’t that right?”_

_He didn’t know the girl that never smiled, not on her lips or her eyes. She nodded curtly like it was a request to push him on the swings or give him a bath, not take care of something that could take down a deer._

_“See?” A crunch and squelch of wet snow underfoot, and the giant was down at Rickon’s eyes. The face he’d bear one day, when age and hormones had hollowed out his chubby cheeks and hardened his body. “Now let’s go back to the car, son. Long drive still ahead.”_

            The boy screws his eyes shut. He wants to stay there, wrapped in the warmth of his brother and his memory and his parents, that smile and that pride. But they’re gone when he opens them again. Just the air now turned to freezing, moon glimpsed through the curtain of Shaggy’s coat.

            “They want me to go back, Shag,” he says into a twitching ear. “You don’t know cities, do you? Heh. No more than me, I think. You’d hate it. So would I...”

            There’s a scrape and slide from the patio door and at once he bats away the past and what it’s done to him. Straightens back up and turns from it, trying to hide his red eyes in the shadows of his hoodie.

            “‘Now the Sun’s gone to Hell, and the Moon’s riding high’.” Luwin says as he hunches his head a little deeper into his coat. He angles up his sharp eyes and Rickon can see the Moon in them, twin orbs that make him look like a blind man, grinning up into nothing. “Seems to fit the sight, I think.”

            “Dire Straits.” Rickon shakes his head and his hands go hunting for a fresh smoke. “Woulda’ figured an old guy like you would quote Dire Straits when he’s grasping for a profound fucking lyric.”

            Said old guy shrugs off the insult like it’s a snowball, walking along the porch so he can better see the view.

            “Nothing like this in the city. Too much light pollution. You can see it, sure, but that’s it. Only thing big enough to be seen. All the stars, the nebulae, the planets,” he shakes his head, lips curled sad and disgusted at once. “All just swallowed up by the fluorescence. Sad, really. I can see why you prefer it-”

            “Oh, fuck me, you really gonna do the small talk thing? Give me a little story before you head back into your pitch?”

            “Since when did you become so astute?”

            “Since Osha hooked us up with HBO.”

            _That_ draws a chuckle, but Rickon knows from the wetting of cracked lips that, yes, Luwin still has his pitch. They’ve been twelve hours, or thereabouts, trying to convince him, cajole him, fill in the gaps and ease his mind.

_Yeah, good luck with the last one._

            “I came to bring you back. I don’t intend to return empty-handed.”

            Rickon’s eyes narrow and there’s the faintest growl from Shaggy’s throat; the kind that seems to come from right in his stomach, snout and lips not even moving. Luwin stiffens for a moment and then takes a steps closer. Shaggy gets up. He stops.

            “Smart dog.”

            “ _Wolf_ , and he doesn’t like the implication. _And_ , before you make some kinda crack, I didn’t learn _that_ from HBO. Four-syllables is well within my repertoire.”

            “Home-schooling, huh?”

            “Yeah, and whose fucking fault was _that_?”

            Wisely, Luwin doesn’t touch that. They’d hit it enough today. Everything seemed to come back to the same old argument: they were here because now, only _now_ , was Rickon actually needed. Not _wanted_ , just _needed_. Because he’s big and strong and the Families will follow strength in a man’s brutal body. His parents had years to bring him back, when things were even semi-safe. After they died, his big brother could have done the same, but he didn’t. None of them did.

The lawyer’s too canny to make the obvious point. Hollow thought it sounds, cruel though it is, but they both know it.

 _Because they wanted you safe_ , Rickon answers treasonously in his own mind. _They didn’t know what else to do, and when Mom and Dad died, Robb decided you were better off._

“I should have been there.”   

His voice barely carries over the clamoring cicadas, but the old man doesn’t look away. Anger, resentment, grief, he’s shown Luwin all of it in varying shades and volumes today, but now they’re all congealed together into something worse.

“I should have been there, Luwin. To help. To learn. To do…do _something_. But I wasn’t. You had me stashed up here in the mountains like a dirty secret and now you’re too late to use it.”

            “Rickon, we still have-“

            “What? Friends? Guns? Money? How much do you have Luwin?” He stalks forward like Shaggy’s upright twin, cold fury burning like dry ice off his skin. “Because however much it is, the Lannisters have more. They always have. Now you’re got a kid in a wheelchair leading you and how long will he last there, huh?”

            “We still have you. Together, the two of you-“

            “You’re still-not- _listening_!” The door sighs again and there’s Jory, watchful and quiet, drawn by the noise and ignored by them both. “It’s over. You’re the advisor, right? Advise Bran. Tell him to make peace, pack up and get the fuck out of New York. He doesn’t, he’s dead, and you know it.” 

            “You can change that. When you come back…“

            Rickon shakes his head but the wind still carries the words through the rush and whirl to his ears and he can’t block them out. That same voice of condolence and resignation, telling him one family member after another was taken from him, now capped off by his big brother. Robb Stark, the Young Wolf, now nothing more than another footnote in a saga he already knows the ending of.

            “You can help, Rickon. We should have brought you back years ago, but-“

            “Yeah, little late for-“

            “You think we don’t fucking _know that_?!”

            Both of them turn to see Jory sweeping out onto the porch, heedless even of Shaggy’s warning thunder. His eyes never waver from the son of the man he should have died protecting and didn’t. The brother of the man he was never there to protect. The brother of the sisters that slipped through his fingers and Rickon sees a shadow of himself there. Twisted and embittered and racked but still bent on his path.

            “Get over it, kid.” Rickon’s lips part and he’s already running through jabs, blocks, hooks and knees to fleshy, painful organs. Jory spits to his side and smirks like he’s reading his mind. “Oh, yeah. Swing at me. Beat me down. Fuck me up me good and then sic yer pet on me. Go ahead. More than I deserve. But that won’t bring ‘em back, boy. The living or the dead.”

            “Fuck you, Jory-“

            “No, fuck _you_ , kid.” His hand goes up, finger poised to poke and Shaggy’s bark stops his feet without even touching him. He backs up, even as his eyes go wide with the rage of years, breath coming out sharp and strangled. “We didn’t come up here to bring you back like a conquering hero. That ain’t what your family needs. They need strength. Feet on the streets, muscle to match Bran’s brains. We don’t have that now, ‘cause the concrete needs a _Stark_ on them right now, not a broken-up fuckin’ bulletcatcher like me.”

            Luwin’s glancing between them now, quick bright eyes already calculating, seeing where the verbal brawl will lead, if it will become more than just words. Rickon flicks a glance his way and his lips curl back. Him. Both of them. All of them. Always working him, molding him, twisting him where they want or letting him to rot.

            “You want to stay up here? Fine. No, _fuck it_ , Luwin, we’ve been here all day and this brat _still_ doesn’t get it. You can stay here and get the shite kicked out of you, if you want. I’m hardly going to hold a gun to your head the whole fucking drive back. But know _this_ if you _never_ know nothin’ else.”

            One more step. Close enough for Shaggy’s fur to bristle like a charge is running through him, warning growl low and intent, legs curled to strike. Rickon flattens his hand in the air and an ounce of tension drains from the big wolf.

_Not yet. Maybe._

            “You stay, your sister _dies_. Eventually. _And_ your brother. You couldn’t stop that before, with yer Mum and Dad and yer brother. But you can _now_. You turn your back now, you’re-“

            His voice breaks. Something bubbles up like bile behind his grim, gaunt features. Old and nameless, unspoken to all but himself. Rickon knows the look. Regret and guilt. A survivor’s grief and the burning, brutal will to somehow, some way redeem his sins.

            “You’re no better than they were, when they left you here. You’re alive. That means you can change things. Believe it, don’t believe it… I honestly couldn’t give a shit anymore.”

            The bodyguard seems to crumble by increments, words pent up for years lifting pounds clean off his frame. He drops his head and stares at the wooden boards, staring into the past and what poses as his future. Rickon can guess what that is. Luwin’s worn the same look a few times that day, when their talk was bleakest and like a bolt through his mind-

            _They’re still willing to die for them. They’re fighting._

_Why won’t you?_

            The boy runs a hand over his face and the swelling doesn’t pain him. His eyes rove from face to face and from house to trees and this is all he’s known for a long time. But as much as he tries, Rickon can’t remember attaching the word “home” to any of it.

            That was always somewhere else. Anywhere his family was. That was _normal_ , or as close to normal as their family got, and if he could have that back, even a _fragment_ of it, a shadow…?

            Luwin’s pocket beeps and the lawyer frowns, surprise crumpling his features. Rickon joins him as he pulls out the phone.

            “Thought you couldn’t get a signal?”

            “I can’t,” he says, punching buttons clumsily with his gloved hands and frowning at the screen. “Must have just come through-“

            His tongue freezes and his face follows suit. The wind rises, shifts direction and Rickon turns just as Shaggy does, tail swishing from side to side and he barks down at the darkness-

            That isn’t dark anymore. Twin lances of eerie silver snake through the trees like straight worms through the undergrowth. Winding up the path and he can hear the grinding engine, unused to the bumps and mud and Shaggy barks again, urgent and suspicious.

            “Rickon.”

            Dead tones. Dead eyes. That resignation again as Luwin turns the screen around, bright fluorescent rectangle blinding him for a moment before his night eyes focus and reads-

            Blocked Number.

**LIONS COMING**

**GET READY AND GET OUT**

 

He’s out there smoking and Osha knows it.

_Lucky little bastard._

She’s been itching for one the last few hours, mouth going dry at the very thought of a Camel – oh, even better, a _Newport_ – and blowing the rich smoke out into the sky. Tingling in her throat lice she’s gargling icicles. But now. She has to sit at watch and listen as they go around and around and by the sunset she’s running her hands through her hair like inky straw and tired of it. All of it.

            _He doesn’t want to come back_ , she thinks when Jory cursed a low, bitter, vicious streak and went outside as Rickon and Luwin took their argument from the warm upstairs to the chilly balcony air.

            You’re bullying him, she thinks with a grind of her teeth and her fingernails digging into the arms of the chair. Watches Rick and Jory argue, more words hurled and blocked and redoubled. Growling from Shaggy, all of it muted and mingled together until there was calm and Osha rested a hand across her eyes.

_Just let him be, will you? He’s not a killer. He’s only just become a man…_

She blinked behind her fingers and heard… nothing. She looked through her fingers and saw the three of them, still and not talking, just glaring. Men being men, she supposed, but clearly some dam had been broken for good or line crossed, she didn’t know.

 _Right. Enough for one night._ She got to her feet as she heard the tiny _beep_ of Luwin’s phone. _Oh, typical. City boys even get cell service out here._

            She’d just about got to her feet when the three men barreled back inside, nearly knocking her over. Jory already has his gun out, glancing out the window and shit, those are _headlights_ out there.

            “Jesus, what’s-“

            “Lannisters.” Jory snaps, like the word is enough for any trouble she could think of. “Coming right now.”

“Who told _you_?!”

            Luwin fields that one, closing the door and locking it, balcony or not. “I don’t know, but they haven’t been wrong yet.”

            “How the-What does _that_ mean?!”

            “Osh, _not_ the fucking time!”

            She opens her mouth to fire back Rickon, but by that point he’s already tearing down the stairs and Jory’s following him, leaving her and the old man with a bemused Shaggy. There’s a glint next to her and Luwin’s pulling-

            “When did you start carrying that?!”

            Luwin shrugs without looking at her, squinting out behind the blinds at the pair of prowling headlights working their way closer to them. A short-gripped pistol that looks like a black box with a handle is in his frail hand, but she can tell he’s not unfamiliar with it.

            “I would _prefer_ to talk my way out of confrontation, Osha, but sometimes the world does indulge me so.”

_No argument there._

            She’s thinking and she’s not moving and she neither one are helpful. She was twiddling her thumbs on the couch less than a minute ago, tapping her feet and beating back the urge to have a cigarette.

            Osha didn’t need anyone to draw her a picture.

            “You staying up here?”

            Luwin nods, still not looking at her. “Wouldn’t do much good down there, armed or not. Only fired this thing a few times.”

            Osha knows he’s right; knows it’s practical. You don’t put the weak in the frontlines unless you’re, well… a Lannister, actually. But that’s not how the _Stark’s_ work, and yet immediately the thought stampedes across her mind that-

_He’s more important than **you** , old man._

            -and she has to bite down hard to stop it spilling out into the air. He turned to her, grey hair and brown eyes, brow biting down hard on them, jaw twitching slightly and she realizes that this man is afraid. Luwin, who taught her, who cared for her, who raised her up when every other pair of hands on the streets would have beaten her even further down.

            “You’re important, too…”

            “What was that? Osha, where-“

            She’s already running down the stairs as the lights blink out room by boom, Rickon and Jory flipping switches and giving their enemies nothing to aim at. Their bright, warm house with her Mohawk trinkets and fixtures, the furniture they bought at Farmer’s Markets and jumble sales, all of it is soon cloaked and shadowed to give them cover.

            No happy yellow bulbs. Just moonlight and the grey ghosts of headlights, gliding across the walls.

_They’re nearly here._

            “Osha, get-“   

            Rick’s by the door, shotgun in hand when she strides over and snatches it from him. He’s so stunned that she doesn’t even have to yank that hard; just stands there and he’s still such a boy to her eyes. Wants to defend his home and kill the bad men, like it’s really that easy. Her throat undulates behind her hard expression.

_It is. That’s why I never wanted you to do it._

            “You’re why they’re here. You’re the one they need to kill. We’re here to protect you, Rick, me more than these wankers-“

            “Love you too, Osh.”

            Christ, she actually smirks as Jory quips from the window on the other side of the door. Crouched down and peering out from one corner, long-barreled pistol held in both hands, grip practiced and professional. He’s even opened the sliding window a few inches so his first few rounds aren’t marred by shattering glass and noise.     

_Him. Maybe you. But not Rick, or Luwin. They shouldn’t be down here._

            “Get the rifle and go upstairs with Luwin. When the shooting starts, fire from the windows. They won’t be looking up _there_.”

            “How do you know they-“

He doesn’t finish. He knows her well enough that one look into her ever-scowling face is enough to lay out her plan in detail. He jerks his hand out for the gun and Osha yanks it back, gripping with both hands now and moving to the front of the door.

“Osha, are you fucking mad-“

            “Probably. Not even my kid and I’m doing this anyway.”

            The headlights swamp their faces for a moment, make them shine like polished silver and she can see every worried line and swollen feature. Hate of years bidding him to stay, love of the same wanting him to go, obey, be smart and do it _right_.

            The Mohawk girl swallows and rests a hand on his cheek. Lightly, quickly, long enough for the heat of them both to touch through flesh and into soul and then gone. _Things don’t last, not in the flesh_ , her grandmother said. _But that doesn’t mean we stop fighting for the dawn._

            “Go upstairs,” she whispers, pinning him with the grey rod of her gaze and jerking her chin towards the stairs. “Hurry, now!”

            The last word is already being drowned by the engine when he flies from her, a bulky mass plunging through the shadows, booted feet hammering up the stairs and away. She can see him without her eyes. Ripping open his cabinet and pulling his rifle from the top shelf, spilling brass from the box into his hand and pocket and shoving round after round into the clip.

            She grips her own weapon and racks the slide back. Red plastic and yellow brass wink back at her, nestled snugly in the barrel and she racks it back again.

            Osha closes her eyes for a moment and blots out the blinding blazes that pin her in the doorway. Doors crack open and leering voices drool out in the night over the humming engine.

Metal sliding across palms, out of leather sheathes. She feels anger, indignation, sheer old-timey _effrontery_ that they wound come here to spill blood where she burnt sage and tried to make some place holy and safe for the boy.

Then she opens her eyes and remembers the shallow mounds off down the hill, past the tree line. The fungus and weeds that grow sickly atop them, poisoned meat feeding poisoned flowers, and she did that, too.

So Osha’s lips move without sound but her eyes do not waver. She begs the Old and New for their forgiveness, but evil men are abroad and she will not fail her boy.

 

“Fuckin’ ‘ell… and here I was thinkin’ she’d look like Julie Andrews or some shit.”

            “Who?”

            “Mary Poppins, you fucking-Jesus, did you even _have_ a childhood?”

            Bronn isn’t listening. Well, he’s _listening_ , because they never shut the fuck up and he can’t avoid it, but he doesn’t _hear_ the specifics of their drivel. He’s frowning between the front seats and sees a blacked-out house, and no-one in sight apart from the girl in the doorway. Leaning against the doorframe and regarding them with stony, simmering contempt.

_This is wrong. Merc’s right there. Truck’s right next to it. Where’s everyone else?_

            Unsurprisingly, Dag and Lorren aren’t nearly as cautious. As soon as they stopped, pinning her in place with their high beams, the doors clank open and they have iron in their hands. Chig clicks his safety one more time and reaches for the handle-

            -stops when Bronn grabs his shoulder, eyes not moving from the woman made bright by the lights.

            “Don’t. Let them go first. That’s why they’re here.”

            “Where’re the others?”

            “Good question…”

            “I help you guys?”

            Christ, it’s a question that sends Bronn’s antennae into overdrive. Too casual. Too knowing. Too at ease when a carload of men with guns stop outside your house, and they sure as fuck aren’t cops. Lorren’s got his shotgun over his shoulder, swaggering with it like a fucking fashion accessory. Dag is flipping his pistol around in his hand and both of them have that amused Giggle Villain goin that Bronn wants to fucking groan at.

            But he doesn’t. He watches. Pistol in hand and reassuring him, but unused for the moment.

            “ _You_ in particular? Hell, maybe, girl. But right _now_? We’re looking for the old man, the shooter and the kid. Don’t look at us like we’re fuckin’ stupid, chicky, we’re in no-“

            The woman straightens up, and Bronn hates always being right because-

            -her right hand’s filled with a shotgun she had out of sight, swinging it up from vertical to horizontal-

            “Fuck-!”

            He knows it’s mad, even thinks so in that fractured fraction of a second before the world becomes smoke and muzzle blasts, but he swears he can hear the slap of the pump handle coming to rest in her other hand and he throws up his arm to fire through the window just as-

            “What-“

            Lorren’s gloating pig-face is shattered and shock replaces it, his own scattergun in mid-swing from his shoulder when-

            The shotgun _booms_ and blasts the fat man’s legs from under him-

            - Bronn fires through the windscreen, cracking it into a vast spider web-

            -just as more guns join the fray from the darkened windows. Lorren’s screeching and pawing at his bloody balls on the ground and Dag’s swearing and firing out in the open before he half-falls, half-dives back to the cover of his door. Rounds are already smacking into the sedan, crashing through metal and plastic and glass.

            He doesn’t even need to scream “OUT”, because Chig and him get the same fucking idea in the same second. Both yank their respective handles and nearly smash the locking mechanisms as they throw themselves out of their big, obvious rolling target. Bronn hears rounds smashing through leather where he was just seconds before.

            Hears, but doesn’t think. Reacts instead. Scrambling to the trunk and blind-firing as he goes, gun bucking against his palm. He remembers what he’s stowed there, just in case and well, this seems to be it.

 

_Fucking amateurs._

            Jory wants to grin at these idiots but nope, he keeps his face fixed. One’s down and squirming in mud churned with blood under him, true, but another’s firing from behind the door. The two in the back are out from their neat little target-box and scrambling to _much_ better cover.

            _It’s done when the other man’s dead_ , his uncle told him, grizzled jaw and lined face matching the stump where his arm ended at the elbow. _Take my word for it: you don’t want to just leave it to chance and fancy._

            Jory draws a bead then ducks back in, bullets blasting through the glass and shattering something on the far end of the room. Peeks out and sees the driver firing at him from behind the door. Popping up now and then, firing one-handed and Jory curls his lips.

_Be grateful. They might have been competent._

            But they’re not. So they don’t know the basics. Which Jory demonstrates when he takes a short, sharp breath, leans out from his cover, aims-

_Front sight, rear sight, line them up before you fire_

            -resting the three white dots in a neat line across the driver’s door-

            -exhales, hands steady-

            -and pumps four rounds through the door -

_**Cover** doesn’t mean **protection** , dickhead._

            He grunts in satisfaction as the driver screeches thin and wet at the end, bullets smashing right through thin metal and mere plastic to slam into his torso and knock him down.

            Jory squints and sees the shadow slapping down into the mud behind the door. Two down, two to go, and Jory’s hands fly across his pistol without his mind being fully aware of the motions.

            Clip release.

            Clatter of a spent mag on the pine floor.

            Snapping a new one from the pouch at his belt.

            Sweet and smooth mechanical slide back into his empty gun-

            _Clack._

_CLACK!_

            Only one of those was his. The rifle and the pistol upstairs, the one outside, they’re all blasting and banging away but-

_One. Where’s the other-_

            The trunk lid pops up, wobbling madly in the moonlight and Jory’s breath seizes in his throat as he hears that second clack. Bigger, heavier, enough to make his eyelid twitch when he hears all the bloody potential in the sound, pulling the memories from his mind-

            A flash of a long muzzle in the moonlight. Fat drum magazine underneath it and a faceless figure that puts the stock to his shoulder and actually aims before-

            “EVERYONE DOWN!”

            He throws himself down so hard and flat his sternum squeezes his heart against his back. Three thuds follow his voice and the last is too slow before the AK lets rip.


	5. Killin' Strangers

“Angaharad called them ‘anti-seed’: plant one and watch something die.”

 

It sounds like the end of the world.

Rickon’s heard gunshots before, but nothing like the endless, merciless chatter from the _thing_ outside. He covers his ears as best he can with a rifle in one hand as rounds start whistling through the windows and the walls. Watches with wide eyes as chips explode from the solid oak, splintering sounds tiny under the stutter of the rifle.

            He feels the air tug above him as bullets whizz over his body; thinks for a moment of them pulping flesh and ripping through him like his strength is nothing and he forces the thought away, buries it and screws his eyes shut.

_Guy has to reload sometime. He **has** to!_

            He opens his eyes and a pair of green ones are staring at him from under the bed. Boy has the right idea. He starts crawling across the floor until he’s close enough the wolf is licking his face madly, desperate to reassure and _be_ reassured.

            “I-It’s OK.” He whispers, knowing he’s saying the words but not hearing even a murmur. “Shhhh, it’s OK, just-“

            The silence is, like they say, deafening. He can’t believe it for a moment; can’t really hear it thanks to the echo and buzz in his ears, wonders for a broken second if he’s deaf and guns that big can cripple without even hitting you. Then he hears calls and curses, more screaming and whining, fresh retorts-

            Sees Luwin on his side, red hand pressed to his side, face a white, bleached and shuddering beacon in the dark room.

            _He’s going to die._

_He came here to bring me home and they’re going to kill him._

_Kill **me**. They’re going to-_

            “F-Fuck you!”

            He sounds like a child, screaming at the monster he cannot see, and he knows it, but he does it anyway. Screams loud and forces the oxygen back into his. He knows the bastard outside is reloading _right now_ , knows he has but seconds and he has to make them count-

            Sees Luwin again. Listens to his shallow gasping, thick with pain, afraid that if he breathes all the way out he may never feel air in his lungs again.

            Grits his teeth as a sob tries to batter them down. No. He has to think of the _others_. He’s not a medic, or a doctor. They need guns out there now, not healers. They need-

_Teeth._

            “Shag,” he growls, so much like his comrade for a decade that you’d have to listen hard to find a difference. The wolf immediately perks up and he points to the back stairs. “Go!”

            There’s an answering _woof!_ and a loping black blur across the ruined floor, pattering down the stairs with heavy feet and Rickon’s own steps follow seconds later, jerking the bolt back and forth, pushing a fresh round into the breech.

            _They thinks we’re upstairs_ , he thinks, beating away the cries in his skull and the fear threatening to drown him, holding onto the frantic moment like he’s clinging to a comet. _They won’t expect us coming from the side._

            Man and wolf hit the open air through the back door, and even from here they can smell the stink and sizzle of hissing brass and gunsmoke. Rickon breaths, like Tor taught him. In through the nose… hold it… out through the mouth. Faster. Deeper. Until his eyes are clear and he’s moving again.

 

“Fucking _bastard_!”

            Jory’s vomiting curses to match the blood steaming between the hand pressed to his face and Osha has forces herself to look away and back at the guys who did it to him. The Stark shooter is hunkered down and almost curled up as the fucker outside plasters her house – _their_ house – with enough ordnance to obliterate a T-Rex.

            She does the same, crawling on her belly through the wood chips and wreckage of their font room.

            Feels the rounds chase her, but not catch her.

            Then there’s nothing. Just he blubbering curses outside like skeeter buzzes and she almost can’t believe it’s over, mind wanting to leap to the conclusion-

            _No. They’re not. They’re just reloading._

_Well, fuck **that**. _

            She didn’t hesitate when those last bastards came sniffing around for her boy, damned if she will this time. She’s a whirl to her feet and the snick-crack of the slide, shoving the stock to her shoulder and the barrel out the window-

            -lines up on a face she thinks too young for that line of work, aiming around the back of the car-

            Fire, pumps another round in place as the gun bucks and the kid reels back with a spray of scarlet drops trailing after him from his hand.

            “Shoot _back_ , you useless cunt!”

            “My-My _balls_ , my fuck- _kff!-_ ing-“

            “I will fuckin’ slot you _myself_ if you don’t get your arse fuckin’ _firing_!”

            Osha blasts another round that shatters a rear light, but some corner of her mind frowns and cocks its metaphorical head. “Slot you”? Doesn’t sound like a City boy. And where did that accent come from?

_Maybe you could ask him after he’s finished **shooting you**!_

            That’s all the encouragement she needs, because a moment later the black silhouette is popping back up, long black rifle swung up to his shoulder and it’s going to start over, a fresh barrage and she doesn’t know if it hasn’t _already_ killed-

_Don’t think that. Don’t ever think that._

She keeps her feet. Holds her stance. Looks the bastard straight over her shotgun and-

           

“ _Fucking_ Jesus-!”

            Bronn nearly feels the buckshot shave his scruff and the sparks hiss against his skin, pinging off the open trunk, missing him by scant inches. Instinct drives him back to cover, return fire forgotten for the moment.

            Gives him a moment to take inventory.

            Dag, moaning and writhing weakly, dragging blood after him like a dying slug.

            Lorren, sitting upright like a fat stupid child with shredded legs, shouting curses no-one can make out as he fires obliterates what’s left of the windows and the screen doors with his precious, pretty chrome shotgun.

            Chig at his side, one arm a red mess, other hand clutching his pistol as he swears softly and peeks over the car.

            “It’s fuckin’ _fucked_ , man!”    

_Oh, you fucking **think**?!”_

            He wants to scream it but keeps the words in his own head for now. Should have capitalized on his suppressing fire, moved up with him covering them and cleared the front room while everyone hit the deck. Maybe gone round the side and gone up their arses, bullets in the back, job done.

            But not with one dying and useless, two wounded and mostly the same, only him without holes leaking into the dark mud and Bronn’s smacking himself because-

_You fucked this up from the get-go. Should have parked at the bottom of the road and worked your way up here on foot. Hit ‘em from the front and back. But no, you got lazy, you got **sloppy** , so now-_

            “Fuck that,” he hisses, setting the AK tighter onto his shoulder and going to that icy, calm place that’s seen him through bullet squalls before. “Not fuckin’ done yet. Lorren?! Keep up yer fire! Chig? When I start up again, move _up_ this time.”

            “My fuckin’ arm, man-“

            Bronn reaches out and jerks him closer and Chig can see a murder in his eyes that isn’t picky. Orbs like black marble that reflect nothing, save his own sweaty face.

            “What I told Lorren? That applies to _you_. Wait for me, then get your arse _moving_.”

            “Y-Y-Yeah.”

_Well, as plan’s go, it isn’t a great one, but fuck else have you got to work with?_

            A few quick breaths and his future is set. The AK’s a comfortable weight in his arms and he reminds himself to aim _low_ through the walls, under the windows. Catch the bastards on the floor, riddle them as they hide and with a little bit of luck, they’ll be moping up and delivering make-sure shots instead of blasting through the house.

He crouches on the balls of his feet and leans round the side of the car, not the top, keeping his target small as he aims-

            There’s a flash from the side of the house, heavy bullet smacking into the side of the car. A shower of metal shards and plastic and glass from the rear light peppers him, blind him, sends him sprawling back-

            More pistol shots and shotgun shells from the house, Chig still waiting, looking, ready in his way until Bronn watches in that queer, quiet moment all gunfights seem to have. Sees his face go from a frown to a gape and then sheer fucking-

            “Jesus _Christ_!”

 

_Myballsmyballsmyfuckingballs-_

            Lorren’s screaming as much to blot out the endless litany in his head as he is to get some kind of payback. The shotgun is smacking into his ribs with each shell but he’s got a handle on it, thinks he might be able to shuffle or crawl to cover, soon as he’s finished-

            A shadow runs at him. He doesn’t believe it first, solid street mind not believing in ghosts or wraiths, but as it gets closer he glances, wants to know it isn’t-

            -getting closer-

            -bigger-

            -growing eyes like green flames and a black maw with a pink tongue slavering around white teeth and it leaps-

            “Fuuuuuu-!”

            The house, the car, his legs, the roar and the smoke and the winking lights are all swallowed up and the force knocks him back and something heavy and sharp clamps onto his throat. He tries to scream and he feels his throat explode, white pain so fierce and brutal he shuts down, flies away.

            Seems to watch from a mile in the sky, or already tunneling down to Hell, as a minor mountain of rage growls and snarls and chomps down to his spine.

 

“They-It’s-Fuckin’- _Fuck_ -“

_Aye, that about covers it._

            Bronn doesn’t know what’s worse: the rifleman out in the open or the wolf that’s just-

_No, you fucking **know** which is worse. Fuck did they get **that** thing from?!_

            “Time to go.”

            Fuck it, he thinks, and Chig looks at him with something like relief. Five minutes ago they were on their way to an easy payday. Some geriatric, a has-been, a bitch and a boy. No problem, Your Highness, of course we can handle it. Now his crew’s ruins, his car’s getting beat to shit, he can feel hunks of glass in his face-

_Bollocks to this, I am not dying this far from Armagh for this bullshit._

            Only one problem, of course.

            “Gotta get to the car.”

            “I-I can cover you.”

            “Aye, yeh will, lad.” He looks the kid over and Chig’s so amped and scared he probably doesn’t even notice his eyes flick over him, cold and studious. Making a decision in the space of half a second. “You wearing yer Kevlar?” 

            “Y-Yeah, didn’t do much-“

            “Good.”

            His right arm swings out and cracks the butt of the AK across the kid’s face, scattering teeth and sense across the bullet-riddled trunk lid. Chig’s eyes glaze over and Bronn tosses the cumbersome rifle, filling one hand with another pistol. His other grabs Chig by the collar and hauls him up-

            -and in front.

            “Nothing personal, mate.”

            He stands and jerks him around, sputtering killer his barrier between the house and the car. Firing over his shoulder, keep-your-head-down-shots just to buy him seconds. Chig starts to spasm and shake as bullets smack into his back, trying to curse and beg through his bloodied mouth until-

            Another rifle round slams into his back and Bronn feels it pass straight through the boy, sailing out into the night and barely missing his stomach.

_Job done, though-_

            He steps over Dag’s corpse and lets Chig drop to the side, diving into the driver’s seat. Jerks it into reverse and hits the gas, looking over his shoulder into the red-lit driveway, keeping his head down as much as he can as rounds whine off the hood of the car.

_C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!_

            He reaches the first curve and yanks the wheel around, battered and shattered Caddy with barely any glass left intact and bullet holes peppering its body still holding true for the moment. Return fire’s chasing him down the slope but it’s fading away from him just like his view of the house, blotted out by the dark trees.

            He rubs a weary hand over his face and winces as he feels hard little bits buried in his face and winces _again_ when even _wincing_ is like knives through his cheeks. He takes it slow the rest of the way down, finding the time to turn around, cool down, think straight and breathe the fight-fur out of his lungs.

            Until he hits the road and thanks Fuckery that it’s night and there’ll be little to no-one watching him drive what looks like a mobile target range back towards New York. The wind howls straight through the (former) windscreen and narrows his eyes with its bite, cold breeze pulling his lips from his teeth as he imagines the call he’s about to make.

_This is what you get for trying to make moves on the side. Shoulda’ stuck with the dwarf._

 

He’s never shot a man before. He thought it would be like hunting a big deer wearing a coat.

It isn't.

He wasn't really thinking when he pulled the trigger. His hands moved and his body obeyed his mind but there was no introspection. No broader context. These men were here to do murder, pure and simple. No mercy, no negotiation, but knees on the ground and bullets to the brain. He listened to the fat man’s words from above and knew no good in them.

Rickon was happy for that, he realized. Better to make them into bastards, monsters, cancers upright that needed to be sponged from the world. He fired and reloaded, hands mechanical, aim as precise as he could make it, until he escaped down the back with Shaggy and he realized just how much he’d been trembling.

_I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die at all._

_But if I don’t fight back, they’ll kill everyone here._

            Jory’s pistol and Osha’s shotgun were blasting out at their enemies and he took strength from that, from _them_ , braving lead for his sake. He stayed low and to the shadows, rifle at his shoulder but at rest, until he tilted his head around-

            In time to see sparks flare and fly across the Gunner as Osha keeps his head down with another shell from her shotgun. The Fat Man is sitting on his haunches, pants a red and tattered mess, firing and shouting and not even noticing him. Driver is down, the fourth man… Rickon can’t see him.

            Fat Man, Gunner, Driver. No names. Nothing to give them any taint that they might have carried from their mothers, or siblings, loved ones. Rickon forces the idea from his mind, bundles it away in with the fear and the anger. Instead he keeps a tight grasp on the work he has to do, cold and mechanical as the weapon in his hand.

_Ignore the Fat Man. Focus on Gunner. He’s got the fucking machinegun._

            He kneels down in the shadows and raises the scope to his eye. Closes one eye and tells himself, convinces himself they can’t see him. He lines up the black cross with the open trunk and feels a strange twinge of guilt for shooting a man who doesn’t even know he’s there.

_There could have been a nursery upstairs for all Gunner knew. Didn’t stop him from emptying his gun._

            He remembers Luwin’s face. The shock and the disbelief and the chilly, implacable knowledge that he wouldn’t see the sun again. See his wife again. See anyone, _ever_. That’s enough for Rickon to breathe out lowly and line up, wait patiently...

            There’s a flicker of movement lower, at the side of the car, not over the top of it. He doesn’t know if it’s to aim at him or the house so he swings lower and fires-

_Fuck, too fast-_

            The rearlight explodes and Gunner howls like a struck bear, vanishing back behind cover. Rickon’s already fumbling with the breech and bolt, trying to remember how many he’s fired. Four? Five, including that one? A full clip? His pockets clink and jangle with fresh rounds but how long to load them?

            He starts fumbling and finds a fresh, full magazine. Thank fuck he took the time to load a spare one days before, ready and antsy for deer season to begin. He slides it in and chambers a round, looking around-

            His jaw drops. His stomach turns, but only a little. If anything, he almost feels… pride.

_Goddamn, Shaggy…_

            That seems to break the other two, and fucked if Rickon can’t see why. Fat Man’s bowling ball is hanging off by a shred and Shaggy’s shaking it around like he wants to take it away and play fetch. Then there’s a crack and a yelp from the darkness, snapping him out of the bloody sight to see-

            One of them breaking from cover, but with his back to them? Doesn’t make sense, how can he shoot-

            A gun appears over his shoulder and Rickon understands but can’t believe it.

_-back, shit?!_

            He doesn’t know if it’s gunner or not, but either way, one of the two bastards left has decided the other is most definitely expendable. He’s firing slowly, through windows, into shadows, anywhere return fire might try to peg him.

            Not that it’s helping his partner much. Rickon sees bullets crash into his back but he doesn’t go down. Body armor, maybe? He doesn’t know, just throws up his rifle as the two advance and he’s got a nice broad target now.

            Barely needs to aim at this range. But still shoots low to account for the buck of the rifle as he pulls the trigger.

            God, Rickon expected something more… dramatic. But there isn’t. The man who can’t even see his murderer spasms on his feet and he almost hears him cough, wet and mortal, then he’s tossed away like a bag of trash and the last man standing is in the car. Still firing, reversing fast, car a black and dented blur save for the red taillights.

Rickon looks back at the man he just killed. Or did he? Plenty of rounds hit him, from Osha, and Jory. They might have done it. Yeah. They must have.

The man’s on his back. Still gasping. Kevlar vest clear now after his shirt and coat have been ripped to shreds. Gaping, black and red hole in his stomach that he’s not even trying to hold closed.

Eyes that stare up into the stars like he’s beseeching them. Lips moving without words and Rickon stands over him. He wants him to look and doesn’t. He wants to celebrate his victory and beg forgiveness because _he did this_ , and it feels _nothing_ like he thought it would.

_He would have killed you. He would have killed all of you, if he had the chance. And why? Because someone paid him._

Rickon swallows the bitter taste in his throat and makes himself bear witness. The man’s eyes slide to him and he’s sure there’s a plea or a curse bubbling up in his throat but it doesn’t come. Too much waste and ruin is choking his lungs for him to get anywhere with that, but still he looks, pleading without words and bleeds into the dirt and just won’t die-

He takes a shuddering breath and shifts the rifle at his side. Holds it with two hands and rests the muzzle over the man’s forehead.

Rickon swallows again and the bitterness won’t go away. He’s looking into eyes like his, blue and swollen and not fading, not dying, fighting hard and primal to live. He sees a boy and a child and a son and a brother and a friend. All the possibilities and passions he had and now they’re gone, everything good and bad.

Rickon did that.

He looks across the ruined man and sees what he’s done. With two ounces of pressure and a little metal stick one inch long.

_Finish this_ , he tells himself, not for the sake of revenge but something greater.

            “I’m so-”

            He doesn’t get a chance to finish. Even as his finger tightens there’s a sharp, high crack behind and to his left that makes his whole body spasm like a spastic’s and he cries out in shock as the bullet catches the dying man through the eye. Blasts it apart like an orb of festering offal and the shaking, the breathing, the bloody gasping, it all stops.

            Jory Cassel is panting behind him, one hand almost completely red and pressed to half his face. Gently smoking pistol lowering in his other hand. Rickon looks and tries to sees any semblance, any similar horror in his face but Jory is a stone slate. This is old hat to the Stark retainer: just part of the business.

            “You hurt?”

            “I-No, I’m-“

            “What about-“

_Luwin._

            Whatever fury and sickness stuck him in that spot vanishes as he remembers the man upstairs with blood seeping from his guts. His blood pumps like ice water for a second then speeds to nitro as he sprints back into the house, taking the steps three at a time.

_No noise. C’mon, Luwin, say something. Anything-_

            He’s at the door with Jory close behind when he sees the two of them. Osha, bent over the wrinkled hand clutched in her own, shoulders bobbing with silent sobs. Luwin staring from the floor, face waxen and waning in the moonlight.

            Pool under him spreading slowly and telling Rickon all he needs to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual and always, muchos gracias to the Bright-N-Shiny Jillypups for beta-ing my humble scribblings. ;-)


	6. Comings and Goings

“Let me bid you farewell,

Every man has to die.”

 

Jory knows he’s got more immediate things to worry about. Being down to one working eye, for example. Every time he blinks is a reminder; what’s left of his eyelid scraping over the hole that used to be a peeper, everything around it screaming out in pain.

            But someone else must be feeling it, because he isn’t.

            He’s standing over the old man on the floor, one hand in Osha’s, the other at his bloody side, trying to staunch a river with a handful of twigs. The voices come to him, in-between Luwin’s gasps and whispers, like he knew they would.

_You failed._

            Mocking him. Seeping into his grey matter, oozing like poison.

_This is your curse. You failed Ned. Now you’ll fail and fail and fail again until the gods put you out of your misery._

            It doesn’t take much to shunt them away; they’re old words, old companions. A man knows how to handle those, mute them enough to go about his business. He kneels down and feels the blood seep into his pants. Lock eyes with Luwin, then his gaze slides to the exit wound…

Jory doesn’t need to shake his head to tell Luwin what he already knows.

            “In… the mountains…” The old litigator manages a weak waggle of his lips that passes as a smile. “Never expected… that.”

            Every breath is dragging him over the edge, but what does it matter at that point? The bodyguard Jory’s been (or failed to be) for over a decade wants to call it in. Stabilize the principal, jab some stoppage into the wound and keep him talking until the red-and-blue lights come to the rescue with their green shirts and rubber gloves.

            “This wasn’t… your fault, Jory…”

            There’s needles behind his eyes (even the one he’ll never use again) and he’s pushing them back with everything left in him. Fucking old man. Always charming and polite and thinking away. Jory’s been following him him around like a glorified babysitter but Luwin never treated him that way. He told him things, more than he’d ever have expected.

            Seeing him down here there doesn’t do it. But then the memory of that dinner with him and Erin surfaces, lamb brisket and warm smiles on a cold autumn afternoon. Days spent driving here to there and back again, talking about the Knicks. How movies were better in his day (“ _Movies_ , my boy, are not _cinema_. A fine distinction.”) and the tears leak out into the blood.

            “Luwin-”

            “It wuh… wasn’t. You prot-protected the boy. Now he-he can… he can-”

            Coughing from his failing guts wracks his skinny frame. Osha’s shushing him, stroking his shoulder. Jory remembers her, too. Back when she was wild-eyed and had five different shades to her hair, switchblade snickering around her fingers, daring the world to talk some shit.

            Luwin took the challenge. Saw potential in something Jory would have crinkled his nose at and walked the fuck away from.

More fool him. Seeing her down there, blazing away with that pump, Mama Bear with her cub upstairs, blew apart every doubt the somber bodyguard ever had.

_He chose right. He always did. The world just let him down._

            “Can’t we do something?”

            It’s the kid that asks, of course. Jory looks over his shoulder and there he is, rifle in his hands, and he’s used it, but it’s still a boy’s hope shining in his eyes. He almost wouldn’t believe it, seeing him earlier that day, battered and hooded, glaring out at them like he wanted to throw down right there in the car.

            Now his Adam’s Apple is doing a dance in his throat and he’s got tears in his eyes, too. Another part of his past shot down in front of him, and all the can do…

            He looks at Osha. She looks back and sees the answer. Luwin watches them both and takes his hand away, digging around for one last thing. Pulls out his phone and holds it towards Rickon, breathing deep. His wound sucks and bubbles, telling him to make it quick.

            “Person that, that sent that t-text? Th-They’ve been… sending me mes-messages, last f-few weeks. Dunno wh-who it was, b-but they’re no f-friends to the Lann… Lions. Keep this. Find whoever it-it is, if you can.”

            The kid takes it and even so close to the end, the old man holds on. Long enough for Rickon to look over the bloody phone and see strength still unwavering in his eyes.

            “I wish… wish I could have…”

            He sighs and there’s all the regret of his years coming out in a bubbling breath. His head rolls back against the wall and the moon lights him up for all to see. So pale and bloodless the light almost doesn’t touch him, just accepts him as the same. His eyes slide over to Jory and there’s the suggestion of a nod.

            “Bring him back.” Every word is weaker now. He can almost hear his pulse fading, but the stubborn goat won’t go until he’s said his piece. “Up to you n-now, Jory.”

            “And her,” He says, managing to smile even though the muscle scrapes against the hole next to his nose. “She made you proud, sir.”

            She turns to him and there’s a flash of teeth in the moonlight. She grew up as well as the boy. Went from a girl heading nowhere into a woman heading… well, into the mountains. But with purpose, and strength, and he’s seen both tonight. Just how dangerous that can be.

_Gotta admit, for a guy like me, that’s a hell of a turn on._

            Luwin coughs again and whatever thoughts creep into his head are banished again. Her smile goes with them and she nods to him. Words without words flashing between them and he gets to his feet, pausing on the way to the stairs to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

            “Leave them, son,” he says, and when he turns to him, it’s Ned he sees. Young and confused and with plenty more hard edges, but his father’s son, no damn doubt. “She’s got him.”

            He doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t want to. But he can read between the lines well enough and nods as he turns. Follows Jory to the stairs and stops, looking back one more time. He can tell Rickon knows this’ll be the last sight of the man he gets. Battered and bloody and yet, despite it all, not defeated.

            _You came to bring him back, and he’ll be back._

_You just won’t see it._

            “It won’t be for nothing, Luwin,” he says, no more “old man”, respect steeling his voice. Like he’s trying to make the last moments real enough to settle the harsh words he’s been flinging all day. “I want you to know that.”

            Luwin smiles With scarlet lips and manages a nod. Jory wants him to match his gaze just one more time but he’s only got eyes only for the kid, and that’s OK, too. Because he’s why they came.

            “I know, son.”

 

_She was sixteen and at war with the world. She was losing, of course._

_Osha doesn’t quite remember it like she’s sure Luwin does, but looking back, Christ on a bike, was she really so damned set on her own destruction? Hair in a punk rainbow, cop car colors jangled with toxic green and jet black. Piercings from brow to chin and not a single outfit that didn’t push every button society seemed to have._

_Not that it was her fashion sense that got her into trouble. More the blade she was holding when she’d put twenty-two stitches worth of “fuck you, dude” into the wrong guy in a bar._

_Of all the gin joints in all the world, though, Osha had walked into one with a wolf over the front door._

_A man came for her, with graying hair and a stern manner, like a teacher or a retired cop. She spat her scorn at him like the words were bullets and he was impenetrable to them. He’d listened calmly as the street slut told him the story, how the guy got handsy and she defended herself. Prick with a cut tendon in his arm nearly lunged at her when she spoke but it wasn’t the bodyguard’s body that held him back, but the single raised finger of the old man._

_Luwin, he said his name was. He spoke it lowly, humbly, and every set of ears in the bar paid attention._

_A few people left. That’s when Osha got worried._

            “You weren’t… afraid when we first met…”

            He’s sitting on the floor like he’s just tired, not hurt. Bloody moonlight at his feet, and Osha sitting next to him.

His eyes aren’t so intent now. They’re unfocused. Blurry and confused. Trying to pick out not just bright and dim, but Now and Then. He licks his lips and Osha reaches over to run her knuckles down his face.

            He turns and his eyes gleam again, see again, comes back to her again.

            “Osha…” His gaze travels down and he sighs at the state of himself, like he’s ruined his suit and Erin will be so cross. “Not too good, is it?”

            “No. No, it isn’t.”

            _Whoever Cut Prick was, he clearly wasn’t much liked by Luwin, or his muscle, or the hidden hand behind them all. Something about him being on his “last warning”, and shitty glare aside, the dickhead had listened but good._

_That should have been the end of it. Some neighborhood bigshot comes down to make sure the poor, helpless women aren’t getting fucked up (in public). Osha’s getting off an assault charge at best and a fatal fucking beating at worst, so she goes along with it._

_But Luwin had kept his seat. Watched her like a rare exhibit until his minder cleared his throat._

_“Sir? You have an appointment.”_

_“That we do, Jory.” He rose with a creak in his back, arms spread for this “Jory” to slip an overcoat over his skill shoulders. “Girl, have you considered doing something more fulfilling with your life?”_

_“Um nodda gurl. M’ey-teen.”_

_Horrific pronunciation aside, Luwin raised a brow and mirth twinkled in his eyes. Not the kind she was used to, though, dripping with scorn and amusement at her struggling._

_Something cleaner. It reminded her of a place of pine and chanting. Camp smoke and words old and rarely spoken anymore. Warm hands on her, around her, carrying her on broad, laughing shoulders._

_Home, or what had been home._

_“And I’m the Prince of Sardinia. But that hardly matters.”_

_He reached into his pocket and started peeling off hundreds. Naturally, that grabbed her attention, but already she had decided he was-_

_“No, I’ve no interest in your body.” He flashed the gold band around his finger. “I’m spoken for. Nor do I want to pay you to do something stupid or illegal.”_

_“Yer boys dun’ look solid cit, dude.”_

_“That’s **them**. I’m referring to **you**. Now, here’s a thousand dollars. Oh, don’t worry who sees it, girl-”_

_“Name’s Osha.”_

_“Ocean?”_

_“Osha.”_

_“My apologies.” She couldn’t remember the last time someone had apologized to her. It almost made her shuffle on her barstool and look for chance to bolt. “Any man takes that off you if he knows I gave it also knows the consequences would be… unpleasant. Now, I’m guessing from your nose and your eyes that you’re no stranger to narcotics. So, that’s a weekend of good times in your hand. Powders and pills, smoke and liquids. I’m sure you know better than I. That’s **one** path available to you.”_

            “Still happy you took the… other one?”

            “The other what, sir?”

            “Path. The other path.” He chuckles but it’s a rustling thing, like dead leaves or winter wind. “‘Sir’. Since when do you… call me ‘sir’?”

            “Good a time as any, I think.”

            “Yes… Yes, it seems so…”

            He’s fading. She can feel it in the pulse of his wrist, the lessening warmth of his hand. The stalled breathing and the blood that’s draining, not pumping. He’s tough, though, but that isn’t what’s prompting the tears coursing down Osha’s face, though.

            His courage. His heart. To trust and take such a chance on something so broken. Osha didn’t understand it for weeks, even while she was planning to just get clean and then blow, maybe take some of that fancy silverware with her on the way out.

            _Erin weirded her out, too. Way too nice, always smiling, and did she **ever** take that apron off? Always seemed to be cooking something, and yeah, it always tasted good, but Jeez, girl, you ever let loose and have the old guy just microwave a pizza or something?_

_Apparently not. Every night, save Fridays, dinner was on the table. Not fish sticks and stuff but real food. Roast chicken and pasta, pad Thai-_

_(“No, Osha, is doesn’t have padding. It means ‘fried Thai style’.”)_

_-with vegetables, bright greens and reds and yellows and the first meal bought it back for her. A home-cooked meal for their new guest, with knives and forks not made out of plastic but shiny metal. Actual courses, not just whatever could be shoved into a sack and then dumped out in a clean corner of an alley._

_Osha took the first bite of baked squash and she never finished chewing it. Her eyes glazed and she went back to a different table, different faces, but the same warm smiles. The memories of the village that wasn’t there anymore. Mobile homes and wooden dwellings, side by side. She remembered when they had to leave, and she got lost, she couldn’t find them again and-and-and-_

_She hated herself because she’d been at their lovely clean table crying. Shoved her face in her hands and she was a stupid girl too busy hating the world to just **deal with it.**_

_Arms were around her again. Warm and telling her she isn’t stupid, she just had bad thing happen to her. But that doesn’t mean they **are** her. She can change that._

“I’m proud of you.”   

            She can’t cry anymore. She hasn’t got anything left. She blinks and her lashes push the last pearls down her cheeks. Her face like a stone mask. Afraid to feel, afraid to move. Then his words murmur close to her ear and she can see his eyes are screwed shut and his teeth are shining and clamped together.

            The shock is wearing off. Soon the pain will surge through every fiber, every vessel, every bone and organ and Luwin will… well… he won’t be talking.

            “Osha… you know what to do.”

            She does. Her hand slides to her boot all by itself. She never got rid of that switchblade.

_She’d washed out the hair dye, with some convincing. The piercings with less, because they were just to keep folks from bothering her. The clothes, well, tough shit, guys, she likes the clothes so they worked around it. Weekends-only, kinda deal. Still that was progress, they said, letting go of so much._

_But one night she was in bed and Luwin came to wish her goodnight. His gaze traveled past her head and saw the glint underneath her pillow. She slid it further without a word, without even breaking his gaze._

_Here it comes, she thought. The lecture. The warning. The ulti-fucking-matum._

_“Does it help you sleep?”_

_After a moment, Osha nodded. Luwin smiled but it was with his lips curled inwards, sad and knowing. He nodded and sat at the edge of her bed._

_"If you ever want to talk, you can.”_

_“Why you doin’ this?”_

_“Why **are** you, and there’s a ‘g’ at the end of ‘doing’, Osha.”_

_“Y’know… hurm… you know what I mean.”_

_Luwin looked at her for a long time. Silent apart from his breathing. Osha felt a wriggle of street-paranoia creep into guts and her fingers itched for the blade again. Was this it? Was it tonight? All the grooming, the kind smiles, setting her at ease for when she was… pliable?_

_A thousand bucks. Spent on new clothes or school books she hadn’t read yet, a nice bike to get her to and from high school. All of it buying her like she was pussy for sale in a brothel. He was just being nicer about it and now she couldn’t get out. She was trapped, and she swallowed when his hand started to move and-_

_He rested it over her own and patted it._

_“The gods are good,” was all he said, then he got up and offered to leave the light on, but she said she’d be OK._

            “Remember what you said to me?” She whispers to him as the handle dances around her knuckles. “That night, when you saw I still slept with it under my pillow?”

            He’s Old Spice and dry sweat under her nose as she hugs him. Frail body so light in her arms. Both hands too weak to even embrace her so she squeezes for the both of them, looking at the moon and wishing it didn’t have to be her. His head nods weakly, a rattle that could be a chuckle or a gasp puttering against her ear.

            “I remember,” he says, pain rioting behind his words now, but he doesn’t rush. Doesn’t want to scare her, she realizes, and gods, how can she have more tears left in her? “They still are, my girl. They still are…”

            Osha closes her eyes and her throat seizes, but her hand is steady around the blade. She traces it down the side of his ribs until she finds that spot Jory told her about, years before, when he taught her how to do things properly.  

            She says something to him. He says it back and she opens her eyes.

_Until that day._

            There’s a slide and a scrape and a sigh on her cheek. The moon doesn’t blink and neither does she.

 

Jory glides from corpse to corpse like a jackal after battle while Rickon stares at the phone. More accurately at the blood smeared across the screen.

            It should be inside that old man but it’s on the plastic instead, then on his hands and wherever Rickon looks now, he can’t seem to get away from it. Shaggy’s a writhing black mess over a cadaver that’s barely recognizable, gorging himself like he’s wanted to for so long. A real meal, not just hunks of meat he doesn’t have to work for.

            The Stark shooter is rifling through pockets and collecting wallets like he’s done it a hundred times. Snorts and sneers as he finds things that apparently confirm suspicions, but he keeps them to himself. The driver and the one Rickon gut-shot are laid out next to each other, almost too neatly, like they’ve been placed that way. Jory turns over the first and those four shots weren’t quite a neat as Rickon imagined.

            The man’s whole chest is a red mess. He can’t even tell what color the shirt was originally. He stares up at the stares with wide, blind eyes, just like his buddy. Jory collects his gun, checks the clip and the chamber with careless ease and pockets it.

_You should be doing something. Calling someone. You can’t just **stand** here! _

            So he doesn’t, but he doesn’t quite walk, either. He staggers and spent shells go tinkling and rolling away from him. He looks down and sees them winking at him, a blinking sky in the mud of cold metal, spent hate. He doesn’t want to disturb them, keeps walking away, from the bodies, living and dead, until he nearly trips-

            -over an ugly hunk of metal half-smashed into the mud and leaves by the retreating car.

            Rickon would recognize a rifle anywhere, even sunken and sullied by tires. The jutting, solid barrel, like a metal root reaching from the ground. Odd, bloated magazine half-fallen from the feeding mechanism, the folding stock crunched and bent but, as Rickon knew, still usable.

            He’d heard plenty about this rifle. He stood over it and noted the shape, the same seen in the hands of a thousand late-night movie gangsters and terrorists and all-round bad guys. Fitting that it should find its way here, blasting death at him and his people.

_Kalashnikov. You wanted to buy one of these. Thought they were so cool. So lean and mean and they keep on tickin’ no matter the lickin’._

            He nearly chokes on the memory. This thing killed his… friend. Yes. The pause was needed in his own mind but the conclusion was inevitable. Luwin tried to help him, so he was a friend, and now it was all sliding into past tense. Over the cliff and out of reach and even if he salvaged this gun and cleaned it and oiled it and made it his own, it would always have Luwin’s blood on it. 

            He tried to breath and his throat was full, but not with food or bile. Tried to choke it down and he couldn’t. Walls of his neck tightening, Death’s own garrote invisible and irresistible-

            _Panic attack. Gotta be. Calm down, breath, don’t-_

_They’re dead. Goddamnit, it shouldn’t-it isn’t-I-_

            The phone explodes in his hand and he has to grasp it with the other to stop it falling away. Blinks at it and the blaring screen. Blocked Number, yet again, vibrating in his hands and mingling with his own shaking. It seemed so big, that tiny screen, trembling outward with its light and its activity and the darkness was cast away for a moment, inside and out.

            Rickon swallows. This is… Whoever. The person. The contact.

_Keep this. Fine whoever it is._

            Luwin’s words whisper through his ears and Rickon hears them, understands them, but doesn’t let the man’s shade grip him by the throat anymore. He breathes out and remembers-

            _Enough remembering. Enough of the past._ His death grip on the phone loosens, slides up to a normal hold and he brings it up to his ear. _Present and future. That’s what matters now._

            “Who is this?”

            There’s no voice for a moment; just a deep rasp like a machine with lungs. Rickon can feel someone studying him, gauging the strange voice across the phone line. Deciding if he’s worth the risk of even speaking to.

            “Where’s the old man?”

            It could be anyone. Man, woman, young, old, the scrambler gives it a sexless, ageless mechanical grating that almost makes Rickon wince. He’s heard this before, but only in movies. The kind dealing with very paranoid people.

_In this case, I can see why._

            “He’s d-”

The word teeters on the edge of his tongue and he flicks a glance up at the darkened room above him, beyond the shattered window. Half-expecting to see Luwin standing there in his unblemished coat, frail but smiling like the secret-keeper he is.

_Was._

            “Gone. He’s gone. The men that came, that you told him about, they killed him.”

            “Or you did.”

            “Why the _fuck_ would-"

            “Maybe _you’re_ one of _them_. Killed them all, took his phone, try to get a hook into me next. I’m gone.”

            “Wait!” He nearly shouts the word, not wanting to hang up, to have nothing but silence and fresh, crimson memories chasing him in his on skull. “Wait, just-ask me something. Let me prove it.”

            “Think this is a movie, kid?”

            “I _think_ you want to help. I _know_ he gave me this phone and told me to contact you, but you did it first. So help me.”

            There’s another stretch of metallic rasping, then the _tickity-tap_ of a keyboard beyond it, fingers flying over a keyboard so fast it’s one long rattle in his ear. Something being dredged up and Rickon braces himself-

            “Rickon’s dog’s name.”

            “Shag-"

            “His _first_ dog.”

            Rickon blinks before the memory surfaces. A ball of white fur that bounced around with perpetual excitement. Always padding around under his feet, skittish and mindless in the ecstatic way little dogs all seem to be. Shaggy snuffs at his side as if he knows he’s being somehow compared, and doesn’t like the idea.

            “Wülf,” he says eventually, wry smile of recollection on his face, even standing amidst the bodies. “His name was Wülf.”

            “Anything else?”

            “He… Yeah.” More memories. A smiling man with an Honest-To-Go Geppetto mustache and an accent that made Rickon giggle, backed by a chorus of yipping, yapping hounds. His smile grew. Trippy that a stranger with a Terminator voice could do that to him. “With a ‘u’, not an ‘o’. And one of those two-dot things above it.”

            “Umlaut.”

            “Omelette?”

            “No, _um-laut_. That’s what the two-dot-thing’s called.”

            He rolls his eyes and takes a lazy walk around the front of his house, all his restless energy traveling into his feet like it always does when he’s on the phone. “Thanks for the clarification, teach.”

            “Thank _you_ , Rickon.”

            That’s enough to give his lips a wry tug at one corner again. Someone, somewhere, believes him. He doesn’t even know if it’s male or female, but it’s enough to let him know there’s something beyond this place turned dark and bloody. Come to think of it, the way the words are flying back and forth, he’d almost think-

            “So, you’re convinced?”

            “I haven’t hung up, have I?”

            “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think you were flirting.”

            “You’re right.”

            “Huh?”

            “You _don’t_ know better.”

_Yep, definitely a chick._

            “If you say so. What’s the next step?”

            “We want the same thing. Namely, the Lannisters burnt to the ground.”

            Christ, no mistaking the hate in those words, modulator or not. Android though it sounds, Rickon can hear the seething hiss through the interference. This chick, person, _whatever_ , was hurt by the Lions, and they want payback. But they don’t have the muscle, is that it?

            “I want my family safe,” he shoots back evenly, not willing to become a liar even to someone risking a lot to help out the Starks. “My brother, my sisters, you probably know as well as me how-“

            “I know _better_ , actually.”

            “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

            There’s a quick squeal of static and it takes Rickon a second to realize he just heard Terminator chuckle. “Smart kid. Look, bottom line? They’re the ones coming after you. The other Families wouldn’t have the balls to move on the Starks without the Lions backing them. They go away, so do our biggest problems.”

            “Go away? You make them sound like termites.”

            “Termites are industrious, tenacious and loyal to each other,” the voice says and Rickon feels like he’s back in the Rez school Osha took him to. “So no, they’re not.”

            “Jesus fucking Christ, _whatever_ they are, you _know_ what I mean.”

            “Yes.” Another scratchy, crinkling aluminum pause. The scrape and crunch of papers being shifted around. Rickon imagines a pitch black room, spray-painted windows, mounds of files and computer screens casting eerie pale light over everything, over… her? Him? Some spider in the middle of a web of data. “514 Harding Street. It’s an apartment block. What was that address?”

            “514 Harding Street. Apartments.”

            “They’ve got an old-school row of mailboxes in the lobby. Room 42 will have something you’ll find useful. It’ll be there when you get to the City. Key’ll be under the doormat outside.”

            “Wait, you’re not going to-"

            “Meet you? I didn’t meet the old man, and I knew for a fact-"

            “Luwin! His name was _Luwin_!”

            That shuts it up for a moment. Hell, it shut _him_ up. Jory looks from the body he’s pawing through with fresh concern in his sole eye, expecting to see something more than a boy with wide eyes and snarling lips. He wants to swallow that anger, knows he can’t spew it out just because it’s there. Control. Focus. That’s what they-

_Fuck that._

            “He’s dead because of _me_ ,” he says, voice low and nasty, and not all directed at the know-it-all behind the plastic iPhone. “I had to-I’ve-"

            Wood creaks behind him. He whirls and finds a figure there, for just a blink thinks he sees that balding head and then blinks again to see Osha. Hollow eyes. Shuffling steps. Sinking her body down to the porch floor with her hands folded over her knees.

            Gazing it eternity as tears fall from her eyes.

            Still holding the knife.

_Was. Because of you._

            “Rickon? Hey, kid, talk to me.”

            He does. He has no idea why but the words come flowing out even as his mind screams at him to _get it the fuck together_.

            “He’s dead. He came to bring me home and-"

            “And they killed him, yeah, I know-"

            “No, you _don’t_ know! You weren’t here! I was!”

            There’s no help from Osha anymore. Her eyes roll up in something like mild curiosity, struggling for purchase through her grief. Jory’s a slow walk behind him, careful steps getting closer, breath pained on every exhale from the agony in his face.

            Only she’s steady. It’s a she. He’s sure of it. Because even with the voice and the attitude and the fact she is what she is, an informant, a rat, a seller of secrets, there’s warmth there when she speaks again. If not that, then some understanding. A shared pain.

            “They took a lot from you, Rickon. I know what _that_ feels like. But you don’t roll over and die. That’s what they _want_ you to do. Burrow deeper, hide further away, _run_ like a scared little boy and let them _win_. That what you want? If it is, lemme know right now and we’re done.”

            Rickon feels that traitorous tug in him to do just that. It’s a big country, and his face isn’t known to many beyond the mountain. He could get in his truck with Osha and just drive, speed over blacktop and gravel until the tank ran dry and start again. New name, new story, new life. Leave it all behind and never have to feel like this again.

_No. You’d feel something else. Something worse. Because-_

            “I’m a Stark.”

            Rickon crouches and reaches out to Osha. Both their hands filmy with dried blood, and out of instinct she grabs it with her own. Twists her fingers in his and locks eyes with the man the night made him. He sees her frown minutely and blink, as if she sees something new there. Something that makes her smile, or raise the ghost of one.

            “I’m not running. They’re _not_ gonna win.”

            Another chuckle, but this one’s softer, lower, like a hiss of wind through electric trees. Tickling his eardrum as he listens until the voice speaks again.

            “Atta’ boy. Gimme that address again.”

            “514 Harding Street. Box for 42. Key under the mat.”

            “Take everything inside and call me.”

            “Your number’s blocked, I can’t-"

            “Once you get what I’ve left, you can.”

_Click!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My profuse thanks to ZoeSong for betaing the living shit out of this chapter. And all my other ones. Just because she was bored. 
> 
> ... yeah, I know, right?!


	7. Enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Praise be to the Zephyrous ZoeSong and the Jamtastic Jabronie Jillypups for their epic betaing. You da collective bomb, ladeez. ;-)

“He gave his word!”

“That ain’t what counts! It’s _who_ ya give it _to_!”

 

He lurches from one nightmare into another. Such is his life these days.

            _“Control this is Beta-Th_ _ree, negative on your last transmission, I say again, negative-”_

_“Beta-Three, we have no units to assist, orders are to hold and-”_

_“We **can’t** hold, goddamnit, we’re being fucking overrun!”_

_“Beta-Three, you **will** hold your position until reinforced or you **will** be cited for dereliction of duty and-”_

_“INCOMING!”_

_“Beta-Three? Beta-Three, respond?”_

_The world is smoke and flame and every breath is like swallowing charcoal. Grey figures stagger around the bombed out building; some crawl; some don’t move at all. Kalashnikovs hammer out their staccato song and the guerrillas respond in kind. He coughs up half a lung before he finds the radio again._

_“C-Control, they’re zeroed mortars in on us, we **cannot** maintain our-”_

_“Beta-Three, we have no evac in your vicinity, you must-”_

_“Sarge, Davidov’s dead!”_

_“Half the fucking squad’s dead, private, stay on that window and-”_

_Nothing sounds like a mortar. It’s such a comical sound for something that flings ordnance around. A metal plunk! from the ridge and every man is already balled up in anticipation, Sandor screaming even as he ducks-_

_“INCOM-”_

  _Another earthquake lands on the house and it comes with fire and giant fists that_ _punch_ _swat_ _everyone off their feet. The roof caves in. The floor cracks and Sandor feels splinters like steak knives buried in his arm. No more grey ghosts i_ _n the smoke. Nothing save screaming in the darkness crowding his eyes and that fat fuck at division, droning on and on in his air-conditioned bunker._

_“Beta-Three? Beta-Three, sit-rep, immediately.”_

_Shadows are loping towards him from the shafts of light, holes in the wall, ragged doorways. Bright, eager eyes that glow with unfathomable hatred for him and his men. Hands grope and beg from the ground and the shadows go to each one in turn, shots like thunder for each man pleading, spitting out their jagged, animal language as they go._

_Don’t get captured. Standing orders for all forward units. Eat your gun, jump off a cliff, pull the pin on a frag, but **do not** let them take you alive. _

_Then they close on him and he’s fumbling for his gun but he can’t find it, can’t get it out before-_

_“Help me!”_

_He screams out but it isn’t his voice, his lips. Smoke blow away, the shadows with it, fragments tossed away by wind and there’s her face, her pleading eyes._

_Everyone he couldn’t save. Including himself._

_“Please!”_

            His eyes open with a gasp and it’s not his room he’s aware of first; it’s the noise from outside the door. Stamping feet and raised voices. Joffrey, high and petulant; Cersei, lower and bristling. The subhuman grunts of Trant and his butt-boy Blount, growing into throat mikes.

            Hers.

_Someone fucked up._

            He shakes off the residue of the dream and swings up to his feet. Tries to ignore the hangover dragging his balance back down to the tangled sheets. The mattress dents under him and a dozen minibar bottles clink and roll around, ride the dip to smack against his sides. He spits a curse and sweeps them away.

_Fucking stupid things. Bring a man a proper bottle._

            Sandor’s on autopilot as he hunts around for pants, socks, boots, shirt. The tools come to his hands first, of course. He’s too long old at the game not to have every piece of pressed steel or bladed iron within arm’s reach.    

            Too old not to know when something’s gone sick and wrong, too. He’s listening like a dog with its head cocked as he tries to piece it together, pulling on clothes. Joffrey’s little “surprise” must have hit a problem. Big one, judging by the noise. He was looking forward to shoving pictures of Sansa’s dead brother in front of her face, and instead him and the Bloody Golden Queen are raging around the corridors and the suite and he can hear her, like a broken bird twittering beyond the lions’ roars.

            “-stop, Joffrey, I don’t-“

            “Did you tell him?! _Look at me_ , you wolf _cunt_!”

            Sandor feels a fire explode from his chest and spread to every limb, urging him to rip down the door and throttle the little prick right there for-

_What, exactly? Being as he is? Doing what he’s done for the last ten years? You know better than that._

            That may be so, but he still gets dressed with all speed. Joffrey’s still screaming when he hears the unmistakable muffled thud of a fist hitting flesh, a strangled scream and a body tumbling down to the floor like a load of wet laundry.

            Buries his rage. His stupidity. His hypocrisy. The wont help either of them.

            “The fuck is going on?”

            All eyes swing to him as he opens the door, and his own sweep across the scene that stirs memories he wishes would just damn well stay put.

            Trant and Blount flanking Cersei like she’s really in danger on the top floor of her family’s Manhattan fortress. Joffrey standing over Sansa, who's crumpled and breathing ragged, hand pressed to where he hit her. Her eyes flash to him, shards of blue obvious and bright even in his peripheral, but he doesn’t look.

_Can’t give the game away._

_There’s a game, now?_

            He’s got a gun in his hand, and they see it. Trant swallows and his own edges closer to his waistband but Sandor ignores him, looks over to Joffrey instead.

            “Trouble, sir?”

            Spoiled little fuck buys every ounce of it. Beams like Sandor’s an exceptionally well-trained pet, always on duty, never sleeping, just in case his ears catch a hint of any danger to him. He snorts and waves a vague hand a little too long.

            Sandor catches the pale dusting under his nose. The way he sniffs with every other word and his eyes are like black pins in green marbles.

_Great, he’s back on that, too._

            “No, no, _Drago_ ,” he says, chortling at his own joke and his flunkies snort along, of course. “Just a surprise that was ruined, and I think by _this_ little bitch-“ 

            “Joffrey, I-“

            “What happened?” He knows his voice is betraying him. His words are shot out like bullets, too urgent, too obvious. But if Sandor can keep him talking, maybe distract him, the girl can crawl away back to her bed and Joff will find some other peon to torment. “Why do you think she was involved?”    

            “Because our man said that her brother and his cretins _knew_ they were coming,” Cersei cuts in, always the one in the know. Sandor doesn’t have to think too hard, wondering why that might be. “Four men showed up, expecting a house _unawares_. What they got _instead_ was an ambush. Someone must have _told them_ they were coming.”

            Sandor can’t help the next question. It comes as quick and easy as it was hard and heavy back when he wore a uniform. “How many men did we lose?”

            “ _I_ lost three,” Cersei says, first word sharpened to a fine edge. Wouldn’t do for the help to go getting ideas of equality, after all. “Of no consequence. Not even connected to us, just street scum. Bronn was the only man that got away, although _where_ he’ll slink off to….”         

            She keeps thinking but Sandor only spares her half an ear. Bronn? The Mick? What the fuck was he doing taking orders from his master’s mortal enemy? Yet he’d heard it right, and he makes a note to smack the bastard around the head the next time he sees him.

_Thought you were smarter than to get between these bastard si_ _blings,_ _“boyo_ _._ _”_ _._

            “It couldn’t have been the girl,” he says eventually, when he realizes everyone’s still looking at him. “She doesn’t have a phone, or even access-“

            “Since when we’re were you a _cop_ , dog?” Joffrey doesn’t have much of a range of emotion beyond contempt, anger and sadistic enjoyment, but he’s laying it on thick tonight. The powder doesn’t help, fueling the high, half-mad giggle that oozes up from between his perfect teeth. “Just keep your eyes on the… what do you people call it… the _principal_? Which would be _me_. Everything else, we have other people for.”

            Sandor wills him to keep looking, keep spitting out his scorn, walk over and club him over the head with a blunt object, anything but do what he does. Which is turn back to Sansa and crack his knuckles. She’s curled in on herself as best she can, so much smaller now, head bunched down into her shoulders, shaking from her soul outward.

            Trant’s watching him. Gauging him. That doesn’t bother him.

            Cersei is, too. That does. So does the curious glint in her eyes, waiting for some nameless suspicion to be proved right. Sandor does the math and concludes that yes, he could butcher all four of them in about twenty seconds. But no, he wouldn’t get out of the building alive, and neither would she.

            _Swallow it_ , he commands himself, father’s bass roar thick in his ears, drowning out her pleas. _Hold it in you until you can do something with it._

            He forces himself to watch. To be one of them until he can break this company and-

            Break. Run. Leave. Wash his hands of what shit he can and never look back.

Ten years and deeds beyond forgiveness, he’s never felt that urge before. The cold clarity almost drowns out her moans, like ice water dumped on his head, and he knows that he can’t be part of this anymore. Can’t look in a mirror without smashing it because what stares back will be hateful and twisted as… as…

“Now… what were you about to say, my beloved? _Confess_ something, maybe?”

_As that._

 

The only peace she finds is in oblivion. That night, they take that from her, too.

            After her swim and her (cold) fish, Sandor lead Sansa back to her room and she wasted no time getting to sleep. Joffrey’s sick leer was burned into her eyes but if she’d learned anything over the last weeks, it’s that a mind can get used to anything. Repetition. That’s the key. The same abuse, over and over, delivered with words or fists or open palms, but never that last, final, unspeakable violation.

            She knows why, too. Joffrey’s saving the best for last.

            But she was drained, exhausted, battered mind powering down her body to that red bar she’d see on her phone. She doesn't even have the strength to be afraid, and fell into her sumptuous bed and sleep beyond it almost in the same moment.

            She praysed for the blackness. Dared not to hope for dreams, memories warm and innocent from a time so different it seemed like years before. A month. Maybe. Long enough for her life to be shattered and for once, her wish is was granted. She lost her body and herself, plunged into a vast and quiet nothingness, and even in her nameless dreams she was content to be there.

            Anywhere was better. But it can't couldn’t last.

            The door is kicked in so hard she hears wood splinter. She’s awake with a yelp and her vision flounders, bobbing, too-bright or too-dark forms heaving fast across the pristine carpet. Before she can even scream, Joffrey's there, one hand jerking her up by the hair, agony sizzling through her skull and she opens her mouth to-

            -swallow her scream as a his slap knocks her off the covers.

            “Who did you _fucking tell_ , you _bitch_?!”

            The carpet’s soft under her hands; Sansa hoped it would be wood, or stone, knocking her back into blackness. No such luck: it isn't the dream she was praying for. Nightmare, really, but what could be _worse_ than this? She blinks and her doubled vision still picks out Trant and Blount, two of Joff’s favored dogs, fully-clothed and blank-faced, save for smoldering eyes.

            “Joff-What-Why-”

            “Don’t _fucking_ lie to me!”

            He’s on her so fast her mind can’t keep up. Seconds before she was dreaming, formless, without her senses and now they can’t attune fast enough to his savagery. Her body lurches upward and she' was barely in control of it, hands flailing to ward him off, futile, pointless-

            -until another slap snaps her head around and she bounces off the bed. Red lights bursting across her corneas. Harsh commands given and stronger hands than Joffrey’s yanked her up, dragged her through the door, into a portal of light that blinded her-

            The hallway. Why the hallway? She's was about to ask-

            “ _Somethi_ _ng_ went wrong tonight.” Joffrey is was so close and furious she can ould feel flecks of spittle sizzle on her face. He pulls her hair up, her arms pinned by his goons, green eyes twisted like poisoned vines in his perfect model face. “My men went to get your brother and three of them died. Because he was _waiting_. So, someone _told him_ , and you fucking _knew_!”

            “Joffrey-”

            She swallows blood and refuses to gag on it. Her mind, her _mind_ will save her here, not her tears or her college diploma or her grace or the things she’d been before. Her legs find some strength and she string thoughts together in the space between her breaths.

            “Joff… I don’t-don’t even have a phone, how could-”

            “Fuck did I say about _lies_ -”

            His arm crashes out into her belly and in a flash of black and red she remembers Trant. How he crumpled and his legs just gave up, useless as a cripple’s. She'd wondered idly what that felt like. Her insides squeeze and scream and fire bursts from her guts to her lungs, choking her, killing the nerves keeping her upright until she's limp in their arms.

            They let her fall. Wanted her crawling, groveling, towering over her like cruel golems.

            Cersei's there, standing behind her son. Arms crossed and the only thing on her flawless face is impatience. Her manicured nails _tip-tap_  on her the sleeve of her evening gown and she _sighs_ , like it's all such a _bother_. 

            “It wasn’t our people,” she says simply, voice as flat as her expression. “So it must have been yours. Specifically, _you_. Only you could have known. Heard something. Passed it on.”

            Sansa was wrong: this _is_ a nightmare. Soon she will wake, she's sure of it. She will be in bed, far away, in Winterfell. She won't be dry-retching and holding her bruised belly that feels lt like a horse has kicked it. She shakes her head and wills it all to go away, blubbering without her mind in control.

            “-stop, Joffrey, I didn’t-"

            “Did you tell him?! _Look at me_ , you wolf _cunt_!”

            _You won’t wake up_ , she tells herself. Eerie. Listless in her own mind. A tune from a broken instrument and that’s her mind now, she knows it. Broken and flawed, fractured and slowly unraveling. Unable to cope with him, them, all of this.

            She does as she’s told. She looks up with her dead eyes and flushes fear into them like one would flush a toilet. Mechanical and easy. Anything to give him what he wants, but he’s too jacked and furious for that. His fist is balled again and it’s just time, ticking away-

            Another door opens and someone fills it entirely. Hell’s face, set and concerned, gun in one hand and Sansa could sob, or laugh, or both.

_Thank you… for any time you can give…_

            She barely follows what happens after, those few seconds, exchanges, even the words from her own lips. Every breath is another squeeze in her stomach, bladder and precious womb under it battered as her diagram expands. She feels something leaking out of her that makes her want to retch again. Sandor’s scraping, implacable voice and Joffrey’s coked-out giggles mixed with his froth and fury. Cersei’s unnerving calm, her icy fury.      

            Sansa sits in a heap and waits and doesn’t dare move. Doesn’t look at him for fear that-

“Now… what were you about to say, my beloved? _Confess_ something, maybe?”

            She feels tears come again. No shame. She has no space for it. No guile, nothing left but an animal exposing every scrap of weakness.

            She thinks of the cat and the mouse. How terrified the little ball of fur had been. How intent and excited the cat. It didn’t care for the pain; just the game. It was an animal, and these smart-dressed things above her are _far_ worse.

            To them, the pain _is_ the game.

            “No? Nothing?” Knuckles crack. Sansa goes still. Braces as best she can. “Fine. Have it your way. Hold her steady.”

            She’s yanked up and Sansa can barely feel, or focus. Her eyes are glazed and she’s just meat, without a thought. Too scared until she sees Sandor’s expression. His furious.She meets his gaze and sees his outrage.She takes a shuddering breath that seems to shake her from toes to scalp. Balls her hands into fists, even as her arms are held straight by her sides, Blount and Trant pinning her like a nice, soft sitting target for their master.

_You are Sansa Stark._

            Same voice. Small, in the middle of her head. But it’s there, and now she knows it’s never going away.

            Sansa looks at Joffrey and her lips press into a thin line. Her legs find their balance and Joffrey can see it spread through her, her bearing, helpless and ensnared as she is, but not breaking for him. The sight alone makes his cruelty crack, just for a moment, confused that she, of all people, would stare him down and she-

            Spits to one side. Then resumes her stare.

            “I. Don’t. Know. _Anything_.”

            “Not good enough-”

            “Don’t mark her up, boy.”

            That stops things dead in the water. Sandor, a big deer in narrow headlights, apparently as surprised as they are. Joff finds his voice after a stunned little snort.

            “What… _What_ was that?”

            She’s got some semblance of her wits about her now, and she hopes they don’t see what she does. Gears and cogs in his shaggy head not so much ticking over as whirring so fast they’re striking sparks. Wets his lips and his eyes flicker to hers like a skip in a CD, so fast you wouldn’t know it was there.

            Unless you were looking for it. Or hoping for it.

            “She’s still a Stark. Still useful. You need her presentable.”

            Joffrey laughs, looks around and his goons take their cue, inane gabbling chuckles that don’t touch Cersei. She’s watching too close, and Sansa can see the suspicion bright in her eyes.

            “I’m hardly going to tear her face off, Hound. I _need_ the bitch. For now, anyway.”

            The big Russian rolls his eyes and mutters something in his own tongue. He strides forward and they’re all so struck by the sudden movement they just watch, as he reaches out with a baseball-mitt-sized hand and-

            Captures her jaw and jerks it up. Left, right. Studying her like a horse he might buy.

Going to check my teeth, next?

But she can see it’s as much a game as her courtesy, her helplessness. There’s that blank look across his face, the glass in front of his eyes. Hiding something, The Man putting on a show of being The Beast for creatures that do the opposite.

            “She’s bruising up already. She’ll look like hell tomorrow, and-”

            “You _care_ about her condition, Clegane? Care about _her_ being hurt?”

            Cersei touches it with a needle, just like Sansa feared she would. The temperature drops a dozen degrees and the goons flanking Joffrey bristle under their suit jackets. Only Joffrey seems perplexed, pinhole pupils senseless from the powder soaked into his synapses. But Cersei’s the one watching now, latching onto weakness like a shark on blood.

            _Make it good_ , she thinks. _Make her believe._

            He locks eyes with her and they hold their gaze. Seconds spread hard over what could happen, what will happen, and she sees his jaw work and some plan formed he doesn’t like. She can’t nod. Can’t even whisper but she can-

            Her mouth twitches, forming the suggestion of words and he blinks. Her eyes flicker and she can sees Cersei coming into view, wanting a good look over the Hound’s shoulder. Time enough for her to murmur without sound, not even the kiss of her breath in the air and he better damn well take the hint or Cersei will lose it.

_Do it._

            His arm pulls back for a body shot and she braces. Gods, this is going to be a killer. All that strength and brute power, arms thicker than both of hers together. Joffrey’s petulant punch was enough, it _hurt_ , but this?

            Sansa tenses and holds her stomach as hard as she can. It’ll be like plywood against a jackhammer and she knows it, they both do-

            His fist jerks out and something detonates in her stomach-

            But not nearly as much as it could.

            She saw what one punch from him did to Trant. Folded him over. Vanished into his stomach, almost went through him with so little effort. This one smacks her stomach, knuckles grinding against her and then-

            Stopping. Pulling it back. Enough force to shock her body into folding around and down, collapsing again.

            Sansa gasps and chokes and thanks the gods for Drama 101 in college. She wouldn’t be getting a thumbs up from Ebert any time soon but she plays along, going back down and coughing, slipping from Blount and Trant like dead weight. He stands over her speaks without really addressing her, voice careless.

            “I _care_ about keeping your son alive. That’ll be harder with the families all outraged with the last Stark girl looking like a punching bag. She took a few digs and she learned her lesson. Haven’t you?”

            He doesn’t give her a chance to speak, just reaches down and drags her back up with one hand. Pulls her close so she gets a good long look at his ravaged face, every word a hammer blow.

            “Answer me.”

            “Y-Yes, s-sir.”

He lets her go but doesn’t toss her, or drop her. Seems to let her whole body sigh softly to the floor, until he turns back to Joff and jerks his chin at her prone form.

"See? Shit-scared. She knew anything, she would have told. Soft cunts like her give their secrets up easily."

            Joffrey’s leering again, enjoying any moment that revolves around his future wife gasping in pain and wallowing in humiliation. She can see his sadism overriding his smarts, what few he has, but what if this goes too far? What if he wants more, and she can’t-

            “Did not copy, repeat?”         

            Blount murmurs into his wrist mike, finger at the speaker jammed into his ear. His eyes glaze as someone speaks to him from elsewhere, some TV-lined security room probably. His brows furrow and something gets muttered to Cersei, drowned out by Joffrey’s sniggers.

            “I like this side of you, Hound. Bit more willing to have some fun. But I don’t think she’s quite learned her lesson.”

            “Joffrey, darling, this can wait until later.”

            He whirls on his mother like a toddler told it’s past his bedtime. Sansa can see the rage glowing through his face, that anyone, anything would dare impede his pleasure. But Cersei just stares back down with the weight of years and the ghost of her father’s own implacable nature, covering it all with a brittle smile.

            “Margery Tyrell has some to visit, with her father. They were at the gala, remember? Apparently they felt like stopping by.”

            “And why should I care about that?”

            “Oh, my boy,” Cersei links an arm with her son’s, voice warm and honeyed, mother to son. The fact there’s a brutalized, bruised, terrified and half-naked girl three feet from them barely registers, and Sansa knows it. Can’t understand a shred, either, and doesn’t want to. “They have their reasons, I’m sure. It might be amusing to sniff them out.”

            Margery. A name from another time, it seems to her. She remembers the girl with endless poised. Never ruffled, never a hair out of place. A smile on her heart-shaped face that told the world she knew all the secrets, all the stories, so don’t even _try_ lying to her. Sansa had felt so foolish that time Downtown, when Margie had been the center of attention, suitors orbiting her like a radiant sun and even her, Sansa Stark, felt dazzled by her.

            VIP Areas and private security. Valet parking and after-parties. Tags and wristbands that gave them the keys to the kingdom, any kingdom. Garden parties and smiling faces in the sun.

            Sansa swallows the past. Margie knows she’s here, too, and hasn’t seen her once.

            _She can’t help you. Probably doesn’t want to._ She dares to look up and only Sandor is glaring back down at her. _But…_

            “Want me to lock her back up, sir?”  

            “Yes, yes,” Joffrey says over his shoulder, already walking away, already bored. Cersei glances over as well, far more composed. “Then go back to bed, dog. Blount and Trant can see to me for now.”

            He grunts his reply and the four of them stroll away, the money leading the way, goons bringing up the rear, girl and dog left on the carpet. Sandor doesn’t turn from them until they get to the elevator, then yanks her back upright and Sansa glimpses over his shoulder-

            Cersei. Still looking. Watching. Guessing?

            “Hurry, girl.”

            He leads her over the threshold and all the casual cruelty seems to vanish from his touch. His hands are iron vices that don’t tighten like she expects; gives her room to wriggle, don’t squeeze or shove her around. Sansa sinks back onto the bed and he lets go of her gently, steps away and looks her over with concern so clinical she almost mistakes it for indifference.

            But she can think. She can breathe. There’s no screaming or yelling or furious blows. Just him, standing over her and breathing steadily. The elevator door _dings_ closed outside, a tiny sound beyond the mahogany and oak but it's like Big Ben next to her ear. Finally telling her she can speak.

            “You… You could have hit me harder.”

            “Yes. I could have.”

            “But you didn’t. Why?”

            No answer. Just that same steady suck-and-huff and when she looks up his eyes are on his shoes. Some tipping point has been reached, she knows it. Senses it like only a prey animal can, dependent on the wind and its scent to survive. She watches the big man wrestle without even moving, save for his hands clenching and straightening, knuckles crackling like stones in a bag until-

            They stop when she reaches out. Pink and soft hand like a silk glove next to the leathery, hair paw. His breathing stops. Sansa looks up again and there’s some… no, not peace. This man doesn’t know that word. Just a cold resolution, a tip upward of his jaw.

            “You’re bleeding.”

            She is, no doubt about it, but barely noticed until he mentions it. Now she feels her tongue around her gum and hisses as nails jam into her gums. She dabs her mouth and one’s already puffy and bloody.

            “There’s stuff in the bathroom for that. Stay there.”

            She can’t help it. The sheer absurdity makes her snort on the bed. “Where would I go, exactly?”

            The Russian pauses in the doorway and studies her for a second. If it wasn’t for the shadows darkening his face from the lightless bathroom, she’d almost think he was smirking.

            “Good point.”

            He comes back with a handful of cotton balls and a brown bottle that she knows from her childhood. Sansa doesn’t know why they’d have iodine in here, but suspects Sandor may have had something to do with it. Being prepared and all that.

            He crouches in front of her and Sansa can’t quite keep her lips together. It’s like watching an animal so fearsome for so long relax and reveal some other side of itself. The stony mask he always wears is gone now. There’s animation on his face, scarred and stubbly sides both, all the roiling activity of a human being with a heart and hopes and wishes. She watches him soak a cotton ball and scrunch his brow just-

            She hisses as what feels like a wet, hot poker jabs into the cut under her nose but balls her fists into the sheets at her side and toughs it out. She’s had worse, especially over the last few weeks. Her face aches and stings as he tends to it but the fact he is tending to it, and tenderness is the one word she can describe it as, that is what she feels more of.

            “You’re staring.”

            “Hmm?”

            She blinks and his hand pauses halfway to her face, piercing scowl slicing through her idle thoughts. “Staring at my face. Stop it.”

            “Sorry, I’m just-”

            “Wanted to see it up close, huh?”

            “What? Your scars?”

            “Some women like that.”

            Sansa stares at him, incredulity stamped over her hanging jaw and fierce frown and finally all shred of self-preservation leaves her.

            “That is a really bad habit you have.”

            “What is?”

            “Assuming you know what I’m thinking. You did it in the pool, you’re doing it now, you’ve been doing it ever since I got here and you haven’t been right _once_.”

            Sandor blinks and his eyes are suddenly scrambling anywhere but hers. Sansa isn’t going to let go that easily, though. She’s been the prey for long enough, and just when his body tenses to stand, move away, anything, her hand reaches out and touches his own again.

            It’s not just muscle and firm flesh to her. It’s security. Something she can hold onto that isn’t just in her mind, but has a will and a drive and wants to help her. She’s sure of it now as she sees the surprise on his face, bubbling discomfort so close to fear that follows it. She strokes one thumb over his knuckles and tells herself he’s _useful_. He could be her key out of this place, but she can’t stop the other word that comes from her youth and latches onto him so securely.

            “It’s nice to have a friend again.”

            Whatever retort he was planning to shoot back at her, Sansa can see it die on his lips. His mouth opens and closes a few times and then he clears his throat, going that awkward shade of red against under the smattering of stubble across his face. He finishes with her lip and inspects his work carefully, apparently forgetting her words, her hand on his arm.    

            “Looks good.” He says, wiping his hands on a towel. “Good enough, anyway.”

_Either his hands are really dirty, or there’s something else going on._

            After a few moments she tilts her head down, trying to catch his eyes, but they’re focused like lasers on his hands. Some fierce brooding or complex decision being made again and now Sansa can see it without having to fear her beloved or his flunkies are watching. Finally he seems to notice her and sighs through his nose.

            She knows the sound well. Regretful and resigned at once. Her eyes passed over the black gun at his hip, another under his armpit, spare magazines and steel and iron in leather sheaths. All of them less lethal than the body and will they decorate, she’s sure of it. But that’s who he is, and what he is, and what he does.

_At least he can do it for **you** , maybe._

            “Pack a bag. Only what you need.”

            Time freezes again. She runs the words through her mind, replays it, every syllable and curve of his lips when he speaks. She heard him right, but... but... no. It's some kind of trick. She doesn't get this lucky, not anymore. She's a prisoner, meat, an asset, something to be used, she shouldn't be-words

_No. That’s **not** you. This is **happening** , **don’t** fall apart now!_

            She lets out a breath like juddering glass in her throat and nods slowly. Sandor’s meaty thumb passed over the back of her hand and there was nothing in it that set her heart a-flutter or her pulse a-racing. Not in the way the books or movies would prattle about.

            Sansa looks up and hazards a smile. Small and delicate, tears welling behind it because she’s sure some cruel laugh will follow. Just a joke, silly girl. You’re never leaving. But it doesn’t. His fist marred her and his words lashed her but now, with no eyes on them, he squeezes her hand just enough to return what she’d abandoned weeks ago.

            “Thank you.”

            “Just be ready. We’ll have to move fast. Now sleep.”

            It takes him nearly a minute to formulate that response. Just standing and staring and Sansa can see the oceans of words he never speaks swimming behind his eyes. He chooses them carefully, like weapons, like loyalties.

            How fascinating and contradictory and yes, it's because he's helping her, or wants to, but also because he doesn't _have_ to. She's seen him stone-faced as men have begged around him, enemies or rivals of Joff or just useless proles abused and thrown away. His eyes never flickered, nor did his hand shake when commanded. But with her he was different, and she's wonders-

 _Oh, grow up, girl. He's into you. Use_ _it._

_Not so sure about that..._

          He leaves her alone and she hears the lock clack in the door. She aches. She stings. Her body shakes on the mattress so hard she can’t keep her covers on but she still has to stifle a sobbing laugh with her hands. Looks up at the buttresses in the ceiling and feels like she can reach through them and run her hands through the stars, like she did when they went camping years ago.

           She sleeps, after a while. She has her oblivion, but also those grey eyes, glinting like twin moons through fog. Promising without words, letting Sansa hope for the morning.


End file.
